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| “We’re completely revising the chain of book production because we’re a bookseller, a publisher, a printer and also a distributor,” said Alexandre Gaudefroy, Les Puf’s director. Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times |
PARIS — Gauthier Charrier, a graphic design student, stepped inside one of Paris’s newest bookstores and wondered, “Where are all the books?”
“I saw this empty, open space — just a couple of stools — and I wondered, ‘Did someone mess up?’” Mr. Charrier, 20, said.
No one messed up.
The pronounced stock shortage inside the Librairie des Puf, run by the publisher University Press of France, or Les Puf for short, is not the result of an ordering mistake, but the heart of the shop’s business model.
There are books, but they are not delivered in advance from wholesalers. They are printed on request, before the customer’s very eyes, on an Espresso Book Machine. On Demand Books, the American company that manufactures the machine, chose the name as a nod to an activity you can complete in the five minutes it takes to print a book: Have a quick coffee.
Labeled, not so modestly, the “Gutenberg press of the 21st century” by its creators, the machine sits in a back corner of the shop, humming as it turns PDFs into paperbacks. Customers use tablets to select the titles for print — adding, if they want to, their own handwritten inscriptions — while sipping coffee in the light and airy storefront in the Latin Quarter of Paris. “The customers are all surprised,” said the shop’s director, Alexandre Gaudefroy. “At first, they’re a little uncomfortable with the tablets. After all, you come to a bookshop to look at books. But thanks to the machine and the tablets, the customer holds a digital library in their hands.”
From a business standpoint, Mr. Gaudefroy said, “I don’t have to worry about space for the stock. We’re in a space which measures less than 80 meters squared, and I can offer readers as many titles as I want.” And that is a lot of titles. All 5,000 books published by Les Puf are available, as well as an additional three million books compiled by On Demand Books, including titles from 10 large American publishers and the public domain.
Les Puf’s prestige in the industry has helped it secure even more titles — a group of French publishers are expected to hand over PDFs of their titles in a few weeks. “What’s really exciting is that, thanks to the on-demand model, we can revive old titles, which we previously hadn’t bothered with because they’d only sell five or 10 copies in a year,” Mr. Gaudefroy said. “On-demand, it’s a new economy for us.”
About 2,000 out-of-print Puf titles will be made available to customers in the coming months, Mr. Gaudefroy said. “We’re completely revising the chain of book production because we’re a bookseller, a publisher, a printer and also a distributor,” he said.
It is a radical reinvention of a store that first opened its doors in 1921. The original Librairie des Puf occupied a far larger, multilevel space in the corner of Place de la Sorbonne, and had packed window displays and a bustling intellectual crowd from nearby universities. It was long a cultural and academic symbol, until it was forced to close because of falling profits and soaring rents. Then, about 10 years ago, the site was sold to a men’s-clothing chain, much to the chagrin of locals.
But its closing was no exception. From 2000 to 2014, 28 percent of Paris bookstores closed, according to a 2015 report from the Paris Urban Planning Agency, a body assembled by the City Council in 1967 to chart social and economic evolution in the French capital. Crippling rent increases in Paris’s densely populated center were mostly to blame, as well as growing competition from e-commerce sites that are able to offer far more titles than a cramped city bookstore. The decline in sales of newspapers and magazines also contributed, since these are often sold alongside books in French bookstores.
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| The Espresso Book Machine is made by On Demand Books, which chose the name as a nod to an activity that can be completed in the five minutes it takes to print a book: Have a quick coffee. Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times |
The Latin Quarter, which has the highest concentration of bookshops in the city, was among the worst-hit areas. In an effort to protect the neighborhood’s unique character — and prevent so-called blandification — the Paris City Council in 2008 made it the center of its Vital’Quartier program. The program buys retail spaces across Paris, renovates them and rents them to small culturally significant enterprises at far below market rates. Les Puf was leased one of these spaces on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, allowing it to reopen in March just a few blocks from where it closed.
“We’re already thinking about opening in other big cities in France — in university towns like Lille, Bordeaux and Lyon,” Mr. Gaudefroy said. “After a few weeks of business, there’s a real commercial motivation for doing so because, well, we’re selling a lot of books. A lot more than predicted. We thought we’d sell 10, 15 books in a day, but it’s been more like 30 or 40.”
“It’s an investment, but if it’s well managed, it can be very profitable,” Mr. Gaudefroy said. Along with the low rent for its retail space and the elimination of the cost of overproducing books that may not sell, Les Puf benefits from an affordable two-year lease on the Espresso Book Machine from the French printing association Ireneo. And France’s fixed-book pricing law, which prohibits anyone from selling books at a discount, means Les Puf can charge the price set by the publisher for each book. “A lot of publishers I know are interested in the idea, especially when we tell them how little it costs us,” Mr. Gaudefroy said.
So far, the store has relied on foot traffic and the pull of the machine’s novelty to draw customers, but a social media and leafleting campaign aimed at students — Les Puf’s original demographic — is planned.
Les Puf’s success is not an anomaly. Times are still tough for brick-and-mortar shops, but signs of a recovery are widespread. In the United States, sales in physical bookstores rose by 2.5 percent last year, the first increase since 2007. In Britain, the largest chain bookseller, Waterstones, announced a return to profitability at the end of last year after the arrival of the indie book-selling success story James Daunt as managing director.
Mr. Daunt decentralized control of the chain’s 275 stores, encouraging individual managers to modify their stores’ layouts for the local book-buying audience, thus scrapping an ingrained industry practice that had effectively allowed publishers to dictate which books appeared in best-seller sections.
Independent bookstores, too, are beginning to carve a path out of their business’s decade of decline. “It’s an industry which is very much starting to rebound,” said Nick Brackenbury, one of the founders of NearSt, a mobile application created in London that is helping to wean customers off buying books on Amazon.com, encouraging them to return instead to their local stores.
“Bookshops are starting to do lots of little innovative things and getting people to come back into them,” Mr. Brackenbury said. For many bookstores that have the space, like Gogol & Company in Milan, La Fugitiva in Madrid and Java Bookshop in Amsterdam, remaking themselves as hybrid bookstore-coffee shops has become a reliable way to attract customers. Other shops are emphasizing something unavailable online — the experience of visiting a bookstore.
The Society Club in London’s Soho district is as much a cocktail club and members’ lounge as a bookstore. Books for Cooks — a store in Notting Hill entirely devoted to cookbooks — offers a sensory experience by cooking up one of its books’ many recipes in an open kitchen at the back of the store every morning.
Mr. Brackenbury and his team are allowing bookstores to innovate on a more fundamental level: convenience. “The main feedback we get from our users is: ‘I buy from Amazon reluctantly because it’s so easy,’” he said. “Everyone will say, ‘I want to support my local shops.’ But few people actually do today because it’s so much hard work.”
NearSt aims to help local shops adapt to the needs of the modern customers by making local shop inventories “shoppable” from a smartphone, allowing customers to search for titles, find local stores that sell them and see routes there. “We just want local stores to be able to offer customers something which is just better than Amazon,” Mr. Brackenbury said.
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