(credit: Guilhem Vellut, via Wikimedia).
By Eric Dupuy, Contributor
French publishers sold 419.6 million copies in 2025, down 1.5% from 426 million the previous year, according to figures presented last week at the annual general meeting of the Syndicat national de l’édition (SNE), the country’s publishers’ trade body.Revenues fell from €2.90 billion to €2.88 billion over the same period. Against the pre-pandemic benchmark of 2019, the market is up 2.8% in value but down 3.6% in volume—a divergence that reflects a combination of price inflation and a contraction in reading habits. The headline numbers, however, may conceal a sharper internal fracture, which Vincent Montagne, SNE president and chief executive of media group Média-Participations, put bluntly: “Of our 700 member publishers, 500 are probably loss-making. More than half generate annual revenues below €300,000. How do you sustain a publishing program at that scale?”
Vincent Montagne
Across sectors, the picture is mixed. Literature, the largest segment at 25.2% of market value, grew 4.7% to €694.6 million, driven almost entirely by crime fiction— the phenomenon of bestselling author Freida McFadden’s thrillers, whose French translations generated 37% sales growth in the category year-on-year.
In contrast, comics and manga fell 5% to €419 million, structurally weakened by the end of anchor series such as “Demon Slayer” and “Attack on Titan.” Manga alone contracted 10.5% in value and 13.7% in volume.
Educational publishing, boosted by curriculum reforms in primary and lower-secondary schools, bucked the trend with an 8.2% gain to €315.9 million—though SNE cautioned this reflects one-off program cycles rather than lasting demand.
Digital revenues edged down 1.2% to €275.3 million, representing 10% of total book sales. The professional and university segment continues to dominate the digital mix at 67.4% of digital revenue.
The numbers come as the trade body also pointed to structural progress in market data infrastructure. Filéas, the interprofessional sales-tracking platform co-owned by eight sector organisations including the SNE, SLF (booksellers’ union) and the CPE, reached 9,000 registered authors and 90 subscribing publishers by mid-2026. A second phase launched in spring 2026 delivers point-of-sale data at J+1 from a network of 700 retail outlets, alongside stock figures—a significant operational advance for a trade that has historically relied on monthly Nielsen BookData aggregates. Authors access the platform free of charge.
Concern Over Secondhand Books, AI
The most structurally disruptive domestic pressure remains the secondhand book market. According to Ministry of Culture data cited by the SNE, used books now account for 21% of all printed book purchases by volume in France, up from 13% in 2011. Unlike library lending or private digital copying, all of which triggered collective licensing frameworks over the past four decades, used book sales generate zero royalty income for authors or publishers.
The SNE and the Conseil permanent des écrivains (CPE), authors’ representative council, are pushing for a statutory resale right modeled on the droit de suite in visual arts. The Conseil d’État has confirmed no constitutional obstacle exists in French law, and SNE argues the 2001 EU copyright directive does not preclude such a mechanism. Brussels has yet to be formally consulted.
Montagne acknowledged the diplomatic challenge: “We are working with German, Belgian and Spanish counterparts on a comparative market analysis to build a common position at EU level,” Montagne said. “The legal terrain is largely uncharted—existing ECJ jurisprudence predates the 2001 directive—which actually gives us room to maneuver.”
Meanwhile, the SNE’s confrontation with artificial intelligence developers escalated on multiple fronts over the last year.
A lawsuit filed in March 2025 by the SNE alongside the Société des Gens de Lettres and the Syndicat National des Auteurs et des Compositeurs against Meta, alleging unlicensed training on French literary works, is now moving toward pleadings scheduled at the Paris tribunal for early 2027. The timeline is deliberate: Meta has deployed procedural tactics consistent with its approach in earlier IP disputes globally. “It took three years to secure a ruling against Google over the digitization of works, 2006 to 200,” Montagne said. “We are in the same time frame.”
The French case come amid a host of international cases, most notably in the U.S., where in May 2026, five U.S. publishers and an author filed a class action lawsuit against Meta in federal court. The publisher suit comes after a U.S. federal judge, Vincent Chhabria, in June 2025 found Meta’s training on copyrighted works to be fair use, but suggested that there was likely an issue with “market dilution”—that is, the possibility that AI-generated works could disrupt the marketplace for works created by human authors. Similarly, in June 2025, a federal judge in California, William Alsup, found that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted works its AI training was fair use, but ordered the company to stand trial for copyright infringement for creating an internal research library of books ripped from pirate sites. That finding led to a $1.5 billion settlement, which is now awaiting final approval.
On the French legislative front, a bill introducing a presumption of exploitation of cultural content by AI providers was adopted unanimously by the French Senate in April, only to stall in the Assemblée nationale. In his assessment, Montagne was unsparing: “The government abandoned its will to govern on AI,” he said. “The argument that others will not act is false—they already are, with the same appetite for economic gain.”
In parallel, the SNE has launched SCAPIN (Service Collectif Anti-Piratage Numérique), a three-tier anti-piracy mechanism combining site monitoring, pre-litigation targeting of payment processors and advertisers, and injunctive domain-blocking actions. The program is 50% funded by the Sofia collective rights body. A separate blocking order obtained in July 2025 against manga piracy site Japscan reduced its monthly traffic from 3.6 million visitors in January 2025 to 616,000 by October.
Rights Market Contracts for Second Consecutive Year
On the rights front, French publishers concluded 13,517 translation rights and co-edition contracts in 2025, a 5.2% fall from 2024. Rights deals (cessions) dropped 5.7%, and co-editions 2.8%.
Italian surpassed Spanish as the leading translation language for the first time, accounting for 12% of contracts; Korean continued its upward trajectory (+8%), while Polish (-34%), German (-21%) and Russian (-23%) contracted sharply. Comic and graphic novel rights, BD and manga combined, remain the largest export category at 30.1% of all cessions, ahead of children’s (23.8%) and fiction (16.5%).
On the export revenue side, a stronger performance: French book exports rose 5.7% to €733.6 million, the first time the €700 million threshold has been crossed since 2023, driven by Francophone North markets (Belgium, Switzerland, Canada) and a spike in sub-Saharan African institutional orders.
Looking ahead, tor the SNE, the most pressing task may be political as much as commercial. With a weakened legislative majority, judicial proceedings spanning multiple jurisdictions, and a domestic market whose recovery depends partly on reversing reading disengagement among under-25s, the industry’s margin for strategic patience is narrowing.
“The whole chain has difficulties,” Montagne said. “Authors are not doing better than booksellers, and booksellers are not doing better than publishers. Pitting the actors against one another weakens everyone.”