French President Nicolas Sarkozy; image by guillaumepaumier via Flickr

Imagine the plight of the French. They want to protect their language and culture. They have what many consider to be one of the most beautiful languages, and their literary history is rich. From Molière to Flaubert to Sartre, the French have given much to the world.

Unfortunately for those who think literature is more than mere Internet “content” to attract advertising dollars, the times are changing quickly. Google is in the process of digitizing every book it can (admittedly to the great benefit of people who don’t have the resources otherwise to obtain certain texts), and soon Google and other American companies, such as Amazon and Apple, might dictate the publishing terms of books both old and new worldwide.

Faced with the possibility of losing control of its literary heritage, the French are mulling over possibilities. Even the conservative French president Nicolas Sarkozy—who has been called “Sarko l’Américain” for his pro-American sentiments—is concerned. He recently said of Google, “We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is.” He said France would finance its own book digitization program.

Amazon is also causing concern in France. Amazon has already battled France over the country’s prix unique du livre, which allows publishers, not booksellers, to set the price of a book. Because of this law, Amazon sells books for the same price as a small bookstore in Paris. Now five of France’s largest booksellers, including Fnac and Virgin, have proposed a nationalized ebook “hub.” There French publishers and booksellers would work together to sell ebooks online at a price determined by the publishers, preventing Amazon and other sites from competing with lower prices.

Guillaume Decitre, CEO of the French bookseller Decitre, said, “If we don’t manage to do this, what’s going to happen? We will find ourselves in front of a platform, or hub, already made by a private company . . . whether Amazon, Google or Apple.” In order to establish a nationalized ebook platform, the booksellers would have to persuade not only the French government but also French publishers, who don’t necessarily have the same interests. In fact, French publishers are thinking about creating their own single ebook platform without the booksellers.

Americans are often mystified by the French approach to politics, and many love to mock it. But if we are entering what comes to be called the Chinese century, it will be interesting to see how Americans react to their own declining empire, their own experience of being a small part of an economic world, this time dominated by Asia.

What’s more interesting than these numbers is the way that users of the sites appear to break down along demographic lines. In an NPR story that aired on 10/21, students at an elite private high school in San Francisco explained that Facebook is “safer and more high class” than MySpace, which is “trashy.”

Another group of San Francisco teenagers—the mostly Latino, mostly lower-income students in an art class at a community gallery called Southern Exposure—had a different take on the difference between the two sites. As 19-year-old Diego Luna put it,

“I have friends who are white . . . They are my white people friends and they are mostly on Facebook. That’s why I use Facebook. My brown people are on MySpace.”

Research supports the idea that race and class factor significantly into people’s social networking preferences. As social media researcher danah boyd (who prefers lowercase) told NPR, people tend to re-create online the same kinds of “neighborhoods” they inhabit in real life.

“Young people—and for the most part adults as well—don’t really interact online with strangers,” she says. “They talk to people they already know. You have environments in which people are divided by race, divided by class, divided by lifestyle. When they go online they are going to interact in the same way.”

No matter how vast the Internet may be, it seems that we identify and associate with small communities of people like ourselves. What are implications of this for the book world? Should publishers increasingly refine and tailor their offerings to specialized target audiences, or is it still possible to appeal to a broad and diverse readership?

What is the biggest challenge for publishers and bookstores today? The simple answer, of course, is that people are buying fewer books, and when they do buy books, it’s increasingly online. But it’s not as if people are reading less. They might, in fact, be reading more, except now they have a new option: free content in the ever expanding virtual world of the Internet.

I sometimes think of this as an American phenomenon. In the United States attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and people seem more interested in reading blogs or watching strangers lip sync on YouTube than doing something as sedate and tedious as reading a novel. But I was discouraged to learn recently that in France, too, book buying is on the decline.

This week in Nice I found a small book, Lettres à mon libraire (Letters to My Bookseller), that helped reassure me that the world has not completely abandoned the idea of books and the stores that nurture and sell them. For the book forty-five French writers wrote brief letters, verging on love letters at times, to bookstores and booksellers. In the preface François Busnel (a well-known editor and host of a literary television program in France) begins by arguing something seemingly antiquated but at the same time intuitively true for those who grew up in the nondigital world. “Soyons honnêtes: il n’y a pas de livre sans librairie, pas d’écrivain sans libraire” (“Let’s be honest: there is no book without a bookstore, no writer without a bookseller”). He then goes on to pin the problem of bookselling today on capitalism’s commodification of art.

Literature [is] the most useless of activities. That is what we hear every day . . . in this overloaded century, which made speed its supreme value and superficiality its guardian angel, which in metaphysical discourse asked the question “What is this for?” and insisted on profitability as the answer to everything, it is a good sign, I’ve said, that something resists the terrible temptation to declare itself “useful.” Beauty is useless, as poets and philosophers all affirm.

It is in this spirit that bookstores have more than commercial value that novelist Michèle Lesbre, one of the forty-five authors, writes,

Dear bookseller of my youth. I learned that you died several months ago. I couldn’t believe the bad news. Your tiny bookstore, at the top of rue des Gras and under the shadow of the cathedral, in Clermont-Ferrand, was so long the only real sanctuary for those that thought literature could save the world, one day.

True, these passages are nostalgic and in themselves of little effect, as is much of the commentary these days lamenting the decline of reading and wearily pushing against the upcoming digital revolution in book publishing. But if it’s any consolation, books and bookstores are still valued by a lot of people, and in the worst case, when everyone has a Kindle or an Apple Tablet for reading, you’ll probably still be able to find paper books. They’ll be right next to the vinyl record section.

But the most distinguishing thing about Europa is the books themselves—which is to say that you can spot one from a mile away. All of their titles are released in trade paperback (common among many European publishers) with handsome French flaps, which give the books a sleek and elegant feel. And every cover bears Europa’s signature stork logo. Many of their covers feature bold images that are cut out against brightly colored backgrounds.

A recent discussion on The Book Design Review suggests that there is little consensus about the cover designs themselves. While some who commented appreciated the spareness and eyecatching images on many of the covers, others found them boring and somehow dated looking. In spite of people’s aesthetic differences on this point, however, there seems to be no dispute about the fact that Europa’s books are immediately recognizable.

“They attract me because I know they’re Europa titles,” one commenter confessed. That pretty much says it all.

In light of all that has happened in publishing in recent decades, it seems that the essence of the “retro” publishing model at Europa Editions is its focus on the quality of the text itself—language, characters, and story—and a staunch belief in the inherent salability of good literature.

Some hallmarks of Europa’s retro style:

• A decorated industry veteran at the helm. Europa is headed by Kent Carroll, who served for 12 years as editor-in-chief at the legendary Grove Press (which had transformed the American literary consciousness during the 1950s and 1960s with authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs) before establishing his own highly esteemed company, Carroll & Graf.
• A commitment to building their readership from the ground up. Whereas the “new” (post-conglomerate takeover) publishing model is predicated on the expectation that a book should have a built-in market of thousands before it’s even released, Europa is committed to capturing the attention of reviewers and winning the respect and loyalty of independent booksellers.
• Low overhead. In the wake of the conglomerate takeovers, many publishers—who used to behave like college professors—came down with a kind of corporate fever. Midtown offices got big and glitzy, salaries and expense accounts followed suit. At Europa Mr. Carroll is the only full-time employee. He operates out of a modest office in Union Square, New York, with one freelance assistant and a couple of unpaid interns.
• Maximizing value. Another feature of the “new” publishing era is the practice of paying exorbitant advances to authors whose books are expected to sell big. A great many of these books do not reap the returns, and publishers lose out in the deal. By all comparisons, translation rights are cheap, even for some of the most acclaimed international authors. The less Europa has to spend on acquiring rights to foreign works that have already proven successful in their original languages, the more they can invest in publicity and marketing in the United States.

Next time I’ll look at another thing Europa’s doing right—not necessarily retro, just good business sense.