Bookstores will not reopen.

The government has decided, remaining deaf to the many media mobilizations to defend independent traders.

Without being heard, professionals are trying to adapt and call on their customers to favor an alternative to the giants of online sales. 

INTERVIEW

The government has ruled: non-essential businesses will not reopen.

At the same time, supermarkets will no longer be able to sell these types of products on their shelves, like books for example.

Since the start of confinement, booksellers have been mobilizing to reopen their doors, supported by petitions, publishers or even the jurors of the Goncourt Prize, who have decided to postpone the awarding of the literary prize.

In the meantime, the profession is trying to organize itself to cope, while affirming the need for a reopening.

"We have a moral and intellectual obligation to open bookstores as quickly as possible," says writer Philippe Besson, on Europe 1. 

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The importance of books

"I am like many French people, in favor of confinement, and the booksellers who are with us are in the same situation. But to consider that the bookstore is not an essential business is absurd, a fundamental stupidity", adds the author, signatory of a column published in

Le Monde

this weekend entitled: "To open all bookstores like all libraries, it is to make the choice of culture".

"Books are what allows you to escape, to think, to take a step back, to arm yourself intellectually. In a time when obscurantism is progressing, it is an essential mission. Books are still a means of escaping reality. It is also a tool of awakening, emancipation. How is freedom of expression exercised if there are no more people who can write books, no more people? who can read them, essays, comics: it becomes very virtual, ”he adds.

"We are constantly talking about French cultural expression, to gargle it. It was frankly the moment to show it, otherwise it is only bragging and perfectly empty speech."

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Writer Philippe Besson also calls for avoiding purchases on Amazon as much as possible, while anticipating gifts for the holidays.

This would allow bookstores to recover cash.

To support booksellers, other independent online sales websites exist such as placedeslibraires.fr or librairiesindépendantes.com