Independent bookstore party celebrates 40 years of the Lang Law

480 booksellers celebrated the 23rd edition of the independent bookstore festival on Saturday.

An opportunity to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the law relating to the price of books, known as the Lang law, which limits competition on the price of books sold to the public in order to protect the sector.

>> Find Europe evening weekend in podcast and in replay here

Without this law, "the booksellers would have disappeared"

"It was a very big historic step forward", remembers Marie-Rose Guarniéri, director of the Librairie des Abbesses in Paris and who is organizing this celebration.

"When Jack Lang arrived with François Mitterrand in power, they immediately fought so that we leave the book of the market economy and that we are not in a competition that would have been unfair", continues- she at the microphone of Europe 1. Since 1981, regardless of where it is sold, a book has been sold at the same price.

>> READ ALSO

- The unexpected success of a book in which ... there is nothing to read!

But for Marie-Rose Guarniéri, 40 years later, we must continue to defend this law: "there are still 1,000 ways to counter it and to ensure that its effects and its importance are reduced". "This law protects the creation and the great profession of booksellers, which is a craft, with people who have know-how and who also work to defend creation", she develops, before concluding: "If the supermarkets had had their hands on the book market, they would have imposed their diktat. It would have been very damaging, as it was for the record world. The booksellers would have disappeared ".