French publishers push for lending rights

French publishers and authors are lobbying the government to apply legislation enabling municipal libraries to impose lending rights.

Publishers sent out a petition three weeks ago asking authors to approve a ban on lending their books until lending rights were introduced. About 300 well-known authors have responded, and others are known to share their views. "The great majority of known authors are in favour of lending rights," said Serge Eyrolles, president of the French National Book Publishing Association (Syndicat National de l'Edition).

Statistics on book publishing and library lending illustrate the problem. The number of books borrowed from local libraries has more than trebled, from 54 million in 1985 to about 160 million in 1998, while sales have plateaued at under 300 million copies a year. The average print run per book has plunged from about 15,000 to 9,000 copies.

The Syndicat is calling for a borrower's fee of one euro a book, while the writers' union (Société des Gens de Lettres) said an alternative would be an annual subscription of FF100 per person, with exemption for the under-18s and the unemployed. An independent report commissioned from Jean-Marie Borneix by Culture Minister Catherine Trautman and submitted in summer 1998 advocated an annual charge of FF15 to FF20, but union director Arlette Stroumza said that this figure was "totally unacceptable".

Lending rights have been allowed under French law since 1957 and were confirmed by a European directive in 1992. But the application decrees for the law have still not been published, even though a culture ministry official told a conference on lending rights in Ottawa last October that their introduction in France was "imminent", Ms Stroumza said.

Lending rights exist in nearly all other European countries, except for Spain and Italy, which are now drawing up plans to introduce them. In most cases, all the cash goes to authors. When it is shared, authors typically receive 70% and publishers 30%. This ratio was advocated by the Borneix report, but in the past three years a number of publisher-author contracts have included a 50:50 split in preparation for the introduction of lending rights.

The two French unions have set up an equally-owned joint venture called Sofia that would collect the cash from libraries and distribute it to authors and publishers.