aixcentric

Everyone in Aix seemed despondent when the Librarie de Provence in the cours Mirabeau closed its doors in 2019: the future for book sales seemed doomed as we all turned to online sources.  Then came 2020 which closed shops for weeks on end.

But a funny thing happened –  as retail went into a tail-spin, book sales only decreased by -3.3% across France.  Online sales were still doing well, but independent book shops were fighting back with their own online services, deliveries, and ‘click & collect’ counters in doorways.   And once confinement was over in December for instance, there was an ‘unexpected explosion’ of 30-35% book sales in PACA.  People were reading books again!

Aix’s Book In Bar is open to welcome customers.  ‘We’re doing the best we can given the circumstances… Covid + Brexit are making it a bit difficult for us but we’re managing and we’re happy to see our customers still supporting us’, they said yesterday.

‘Café services are take-away only but we’ve also brought back cakes from Mana Espresso (also in Aix).  People can buy them to take away directly at the shop or order them in advance! (details are on our website https://www.bookinbar.com/) and social media’.

Across France, the best sellers are policiers/crime fiction at 35%, followed by contemporary fiction.  We all need escapism.

Book in Bar see fiction as being popular too. They said, ‘We’re selling well Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Winner of the Booker Prize 2020), The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett (prequel to The Pillars of the Earth), Ickabog (latest children’s book by J.K. Rowling), Hilary Mantel’s trilogy starting with Wolf Hall (which is excellent), and of course Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land 😉 a bit of everything’. Open from Monday to Saturday, 10am-6pm, /curfew time.

Elsewhere in town there’s the new Librarie de l’Hotel at 6 rue Espariat, and Provence-specialist Le Blason which has just moved from 2 to 11 rue Jacques de la Roque, to increase its sales space.

Reasons to be cheerful.