From book to e-book: A digital revolution in French cultural studies?

Abstract

The rise of the digital revolution does not only relate to science and business, but also to literature and the arts. Therefore it is a topic worth considering for French cultural studies. This article aims to show how profoundly e-technology has changed the way French readers interact with books and all forms of textual production – reading, consuming, learning, selecting, sharing, etc. – despite the institutional resistance of a so-called ‘French conservative’ approach towards books and culture. As a matter of fact, more and more artists and writers are using e-technology. We will demonstrate, via two case studies of livres d’artiste by Serge Bouchardon and Nicolas Frespech, how these e-books can be seen as perfect cultural studies ‘objects’, since they combine different media and exemplify some of the striking shifts in the French cultural field.

Keywords

book market Serge Bouchardon e-book Nicolas Frespech reading practices

The relationship between French people, books and e-books may prove to be an interesting way of measuring the impact of digital innovations in French cultural activity in the last 25 years, and showing the changes that have occurred during that time. France’s reputation as a country with a vibrant cultural and intellectual life relies partly on its heritage of a strong book culture. A significant number of writers over the centuries and a large reading public have helped create this situation. A flourishing publishing industry, a large retail supply of books and high-quality products with fine paper and good illustrations have made the French people proud of their books. However certain questions exist: are there noticeable changes in the relationship of French people to books since 1988? What are the trends in 2014? Has e-technology changed the way French people interact with books? Is there still a place for hard-copy books in French postmodern culture? Is the French reputation for a strong book culture still intact?

We will first review the book market over the last 25 years, and then focus on two specific case studies of recent digital livres d’artiste¹ in order to show how they contribute to the transformation of the French cultural field and allow the very definition of the book to be questioned.

The book market in France (1988–2013): a quick survey

The unique nature of French culture can be observed in many fields and French institutions. Not only does France proudly claim its ‘exception culturelle’,² it also has a special policy regulating the commercial distribution of books: a fixed book price agreement, known as the Loi Lang (Law no. 81-766 1981). French readers pay the same price whether they buy online, at a high-street chain store or from a small bookseller. Booksellers may not discount books more than 5 per cent below the publisher’s list price. The fixed pricing helps promote a wide range of literature, ensuring the market is not dominated by best sellers, big publishers and large chain stores – Fnac being the leading operator. This state intervention is seen as the reason why France has more than 2100 local bookshops, 400 of which are in Paris³ compared with around 1000 in the UK, for example, with only 130 in London (Chrisafis, 2012). France is home to the second-largest domestic book market in Europe, second only to Germany. However, the book market is not doing as well as it could,⁴ and there are predictions that sooner or later market forces will prevail. Some numbers and data extracted from official reports on the topic follow.

An extensive report written by former French minister Gaymard (2009) on the book sector and the key numbers published in 2013 by the Ministry of Culture and Communication (Lacroix, 2013) inform us about the current situation. The cultural participation surveys published by the same ministry, namely the report written by Olivier Donnat (2009), also supply interesting data. The numbers emerging from surveys conducted between 1973 and 1997 reflect the same trends found in most developed countries, but the key facts and figures specific to the situation in France can be summarised as follows:

The book market experienced a steady growth between 1988 and 2008 (3% per year) according to the French Dépôt Légal database. The Electre database⁵ together with the National Association of Publishing show a market collapse of encyclopaedias, on the one hand, and increased sales of comic strips and youth-oriented literature, on the other.

A rise of supermarket and online sales, and the collapse of door-to-door sales can be observed.

The number of readers increased between 1973 and 1981 (from 69% to 73%), but then reached a plateau between 1981 and 1997; an increase in the proportion of ‘poor readers’ (reading between one to nine books per year) and a nearly identical decrease in the proportion of ‘strong readers’ (reading 25 books or over) can be noted. A growing feminisation of the readership, as well as a regular decline in reading amongst younger generations, is also noticeable.

In 25 years, the proportion of readers with library membership almost doubled (from 13% to 21% between 1973 and 1997), the number of public libraries tripled and the number of books borrowed from public libraries increased by 500 per cent. However, it seems that this increase peaked in 2005.

The cultural participation surveys (Donnat, 2009) confirm the decline in book readership and link it to the impact of ten years of change (1997–2008) wrought by the booming digital and internet-based culture.

From these combined facts and numbers, one can therefore wonder whether French people are experiencing a digital revolution. At a time where next-generation e-books are being introduced – a ‘fully immersive’ version of John Buchan’s classic thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps, was published by Faber in late 2013 – e-books in France have been surprisingly slow to catch up, as readers overwhelmingly prefer the printed page. While sales of English-language e-books have grown rapidly – to around 20 per cent of total book sales in the US and almost 10 per cent in the UK – in France in 2012 the French Syndicat National de l’Édition (SNE) attributed 3.1 per cent of all French book revenue to e-books (up from 2% in 2011), worth €81.76 million (The Global eBook Report, 2013: 31). The French magazine L’Express stated recently: ‘Papier fait de la résistance: pourquoi le livre numérique ne s’impose pas (encore)’ (L’Express, 2013).

Pierre Lescure, former president and CEO of the Canal+ Group, was asked by the French government to write a report on cultural policy in the digital age. This report emphasises the difficulty of adapting French culture to an acceptance of digital formats, and makes 80 proposals to improve the system – ‘l’exception culturelle’ – that is challenged by new user practices.⁶ Meanwhile, the French radio station France Culture was interested enough to devote a programme to e-book readers in its special 24 heures du livre (31 August 2012). According to France Culture, the users of digital books are mostly men (58 per cent), and more than half of them are under 35 years old (France Culture, 2012a). The same proportion of them belong to higher socio-economic categories. They are often avid readers and a quarter of them state that they have read a lot more since they switched over to electronic devices (France Culture, 2012b). More broadly, the-82 year-old philosopher and member of the Académie Française Michel Serres has observed the appearance of a new generation in his new book Petite Poucette (Serres, 2012). He acknowledges a new kind of human being, the numericus infant. Petite Poucette (the name of his main character) has learned the real meaning of the word ‘maintenant’: ‘main tenant’, since she holds the world in her hand.

However, a range of contradictory reactions to e-technology currently exists in France. We are reliving a kind of ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’. Some writers have a strongly conservative attitude: for example the Franco-Czech author Milan Kundera. This novelist, who has received numerous awards,⁷ refuses to allow the digitalisation of his books. He even adds to his contracts a clause stating that his novels can only be published in traditional book form, in order to be read only on paper, not on a screen (L’Express, 2012). The much younger French writer Frédéric Beigbeder shares the same point of view. According to him, digitalisation means the apocalypse of literature (Beigbeder, 2011). On the other hand, the French writer, researcher and e-publisher François Bon, and the 80-year-old member of the Académie Française Max Gallo, enjoy this new technology and what it brings to the reader. They both write enriched books.⁸

The resistance to the use of e-books is also balanced by the active creation of livres d’artiste conceived for the digital platform. The last quarter of a century has revealed a new approach to literature thanks to the digital era. This freedom – acquired through, among other ways, the evolution from photographic to digital production – has broadened the possibilities for livres d’artiste. The study of two animated hypermedia pieces belonging to the new genre of ‘écrits d’écran’ (Jeanneret, 2000) will further inform our thinking on books/e-books.

New French livres d’artiste

A new generation of multimedia books are available for French readers. These works are now as mobile and as convenient as paper books, thanks to smart phones and tablets. Their technology relies on apps, or on the software platform Flash. The digital books are like the movable books we read in our childhood – three-dimensional pop-up books with landscapes appearing when you open the page or pull a tab.⁹ Ultimately, they try to be like those soft books for babies with touch-and-feel textures that engage our tactile senses, like, for example, the digital book Touch/Toucher (Bouchardon et al., 2009).

It is therefore both surprising and interesting to note that France has an extensive track record in digital literature, from combinatorial experiments to automatic text generation or hypertextual narratives. In his article ‘Digital literature in France’ (Bouchardon, 2012), Serge Bouchardon (both a theorist and a practitioner of digital literature) considers digital literature as an experimental field and emphasises two main current tendencies: performances of programmed and generated literature, and online animated hypermedia pieces, conceived for ‘private reading’.

Our first case study, Loss of Grasp (Bouchardon and Volckhaert, 2010) is a multimedia work that has been exhibited in many international workshops, and was awarded the New Media Writing Prize in 2011. This (autobiographical?) story is about control and the loss of control. It is divided into six distinct segments and is told from the first-person perspective. The narrator is a male character approaching middle age, ‘perhaps in the midst of mid-life crisis, who has begun to feel that his life is falling apart’ (Rettberg, 2014). ‘How can I grasp what happens to me? / Everything escapes me. / Slips through my fingers’, he says. His relationship with his wife and son is in danger. He cannot decide if the letter that his wife wrote before she left him is a love poem or a break-up note; and he can read in one of his son’s essays a strong desire for autonomy as well as outright resentment. Literary quotes and cultural references, rhymes, rhythm effects and plays on words enrich the complexity of the text. Furthermore, the story challenges the reader to interact with the text in order to reveal the story at each of its six stages. But the reader loses control of the interface in a variety of ways, just as the protagonist feels that he is losing control of his life.

It is worth analysing what the narrative gains from being in digital form, and also what it loses, which could perhaps help partially to explain why there is still only a small proportion of French readers who appreciate e-books. Three advantages of digital literature can easily be identified: the facility for sound, assistance options and the visual aspect.

First, the importance of sound is to be emphasised: as in a movie, while reading the digital book a soundtrack is heard that creates an atmosphere accompanying the narrative. The audio background of a restaurant underlines the first meeting of the protagonist with his wife-to-be. It is an ordinary place, crowded and without intimacy, where the protagonist expresses his feelings in distorted language. Additionally, the famous Carmen aria ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’ brings a counterpoint to the reading of the love/break-up note: ‘Si tu ne m’aimes pas, / Je t’aime’.

Voices are also very important in setting the mood. First the reader encounters the computer voice at the very beginning, asking the reader to press the hash key in order to begin. This voice places the reader in an electronic, dehumanised world, where orders must be obeyed. The voice of the protagonist, the author himself, can be heard, engaging the reader with a sense of compassion. This aural dimension is obviously impossible via a traditional reading of the paper version of the book.

Furthermore, this multimedia work provides reading assistance. For instance, the reader is helped with reverse reading, inspired by Renaissance and medieval rhetoricians.¹⁰ The text can be scrolled forwards or backwards in order to discover the ambiguous meaning of the love/break-up note: ‘Le charme de notre rencontre / S’est dissipé à présent / Et le moindre malentendu /A vaincu / Notre amour’ versus ‘Notre amour / A vaincu / Et le moindre malentendu / S’est dissipé à présent’. The reader can also literally read between the lines of the son’s essay on heroism and heroes by clicking on the lines. For instance, ‘Je ne t’aime plus’ or ‘Bientôt je partirai’ can be read when the text breaks up into isolated letters and builds new phrases. Furthermore, the reader also interacts with and contributes to the visual aspect of the text. Illustrations can be created in the first segment by moving the mouse pad, and a portrait of the wife-to-be can be revealed in the second segment.

But this interactivity has its limits. The reader decides on the rhythm of the reading by pressing the keys, but only inside a narrative temporality that is quite confusing. The reader is propelled in medias res, a digital clock even shows the current time, but it is quickly followed by a flashback to 20 years previously. The reader then returns to the present time, but there is also an insight into the future with the revelation of the son’s hidden message: ‘Bientôt je partirai. Je veux voler de mes propres ailes.’

Loss of Grasp plays on a contrasting interplay of distance and proximity. It encourages empathy with the protagonist – even if the reader cannot help him in any way – but at the same time it places the reader at the centre of the experience: with use of the webcam, the fifth segment offers a full immersion into the story via the integration of the reader’s own image into the text, distorted by the movements of the mouse, and punctuated by frenetic music and the narrator’s profession of outrage.¹¹ The same controlled interactivity for the visual aspect of the text is apparent: the reader is given the ability to create illustrations on the virtual page of the story, but has no real choice of colour or form. It is only the appearance of the shapes on the screen that can be controlled.

The benefits of the multimedia version compared with the printed version are thus neither obvious nor universal. It seems that the reader’s experience could even be potentially impoverished in some respects. He cannot let his eyes scan the lines on the page, but has to click to change the lines. For example, he risks losing the poetic dimension of the incipit, written with four octosyllables and an alexandrine:

J’ai le choix.	3
Je suis maître de mon destin.	(8) 3/5 [m] [d]
Je peux prendre ce qui me plaît.	(8) 3/5 [p]
Je deviendrai ce que je veux.	(8) 4/4 [d] [v]
J’ai tracé mon propre chemin.	(8) 3/5 [r]
J’ai parcouru de magnifiques paysages.	(12) 4/4/4

Such an example points to the striking difference between the paper version and its digital equivalent: the reader faces a non-linear text and exerts almost no control over the act of reading itself. This frustrating experience emphasises the reader’s own loss of grasp. The reader cannot choose the pace of reading and go straight to the end of chapter 6,¹² for example, in order to know how the story ends – if the narrator succeeds in taking control, if his wife comes back, if he has a better relationship with his son. The reader is obliged to follow the commands.

Loss of Grasp is not only about the character, it is also about the reader: ‘the perception of control [is] unsettled by the experience of doubt’ (Heckman, 2011). It is a psychological experiment, for which he may not be prepared, and which can be perceived as a disturbing experience. This confirms the suggestion that digital literature is often considered to be a literature of frustration and failure (Bootz, 2010). Both the reader’s failure and the author’s failure are detailed by Bouchardon, who suggests that Loss of Grasp is a multilevel piece: ‘[It] is not only the story of a man who loses grasp on his life, it also mirrors the man/machine relationship, as well as the author/reader relationship’ (Bouchardon, 2010a). Such a conception of literature echoes postmodern discourse and its suspicion of what Lyotard (1979) called ‘grands récits’.

However, Bouchardon’s digital book relies upon a certain level of elitism and needs a well-disposed reader who agrees to follow the rules and to lose control of the reading process; a cultivated reader who knows about Zoilus, Homer’s whip (there is no footnote); one who, for example, can perceive the critical or ironic insight of the reference to Carmen. According to the author himself, this work is not widely known at the present time, even though it is registered in an anthology of European digital literature (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice – ELMCIP), and in the Montreal NT2 (Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualités) digital repertoire, and has received positive critical reviews.¹³ Here the hypertext is not about additional knowledge or personalisation of the page, but about psychological impact, which engages with our anxieties about loss of control, and mimics that of the story. Again, this would not be possible with a paper version. In fact, the digital platform, both as tool and medium, can benefit the artist and fuel his creativity. Furthermore, the livres d’artiste, ‘usually risk-taking ventures in the aesthetic field’ (Lovejoy, 1997: 113), are no longer unique, precious objects produced in limited editions and owned by the happy few. They can be obtained for free. And in a time of globalisation, they are often bilingual.

Finally, let us briefly consider another case study of an artist’s e-book, C’était mieux avant (Frespech, 2012 edn). Nicolas Frespech is a French artist who has been working with the web since 1996. He created the first work of net art to be acquired by a French public institution – the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Contemporary Art Fund (FRAC) obtained his creation ‘Je suis ton ami(e) … tu peux me dire tes secrets’ in 1998. In this interactive work, the viewer can scroll through secrets sent in by internet users or gathered from public artistic projects.¹⁴ Nicolas Frespech is interested in themes such as identity and its virtual and commercial standardisation, intimacy, webcams and digital surveillance. He is very prolific, as shown by his digital project ‘l’Echoppe photographique’, a worldwide online photo creation and sharing application, which has now been online for nine years, offering a free and original service through which anyone can order a photograph on any topic related to the web (social networks, robotics, money, net art, Google, etc.). The artist will take the photo and send it to the requestor so that it can be displayed both on a website and on mobile devices.

However, the book is still a medium for artistic creation. Frespech is very interested in e-books for viewing online and on tablets. His website LirEPUB is a platform for the dissemination of livres d’artiste in e-pub format, as well as for information and research output on digital creation. Artistic productions can be bought or downloaded from the website,¹⁵ and works by Pharrell Williams, Florent Lagrange or Elodie Petit can also be downloaded.

C’était mieux avant will further enhance our reflection on books. This 46-page digital livre d’artiste, written in black ink on white pages, offers only text. No image, no sound, no special effects are offered. Only the text matters, as in an ‘ordinary’ paper book. The title is promising. Based on a familiar sentence, ‘C’était mieux avant’, it suggests a narrative of positive things that happened ‘before’, in all likelihood in the past. However, the reader is deceived. There is no narration, because the same sentence, ‘C’était mieux avant’, is printed on each and every page, the only difference being the addition of ellipses at the end of the sentence from page 7, ironically suggesting that even the first pages are better than the following ones and that the text keeps on deteriorating through the act of reading it.

This livre d’artiste recalls the work of the surrealist artist René Magritte and emphasises the provocative dimension of contemporary art and its black humour. Playing on words, it gives the adverb ‘avant’ its full significance, temporal as well as spatial. It also relies on deception: the ellipses at the end of the sentence add an ironic comment and seem to mock the reader. It also has a deeper psychological meaning, making us aware of the socio-emotional dimension of our thinking¹⁶ and our instinctive resistance to change. The e-pub format of this livre d’artiste by Frespech and its free access are certainly an asset and contribute to the dissemination of art for everyone – and who would pay for such a book?

The past 25 years have witnessed the emergence of new technologies; they have also changed our relationship with books. We have expanded our notions of what books are and what they can be. By the end of 2013, it was estimated that French consumers owned some 6 million tablet computers and half a million e-reading devices. One French person out of five has already read an e-book (SNE, 2013: 88). From print to digital form, from e-book to enhanced book, from commodity to livre d’artiste, texts are now even more affordable and available than ever. Besides the print versions, to which French people seem to be more attached than their Anglo-Saxon neighbours, books are now to be found in facsimile, rendered as a PDF and displayed on a computing device with a large screen – the French digital library Gallica, for example, provides the reader with 484,694 books or 49,149 manuscripts.¹⁷ Classic e-books allow some adjustments – font sizes can be changed and highlighting or annotations are possible – and can be read on a large-screen computer, a tablet or a smart phone. The new enhanced books offer audio, video and computer simulations. These enhanced books could potentially threaten the French traditional book business, as they are particularly interesting as children’s books or, as we have seen, as livres d’artiste.

But was it better before, as Nicolas Frespech suggests? Some consider e-books to have no cultural value, not being actual books. The so-called specific national preference for cultural traditions over the (US) notion of culture and entertainment as an industry and a business (The Global eBook Report, 2013: 31) recalls the violent attack against paperback publishing that occurred exactly 60 years ago, when the French Livre de Poche was born.¹⁸ Filippachi’s cheap pocket books (2 francs in 1953) were fiercely resisted. The philosopher and art historian Hubert Damish, for instance, reported in the Mercure de France that paperback publishing was ‘une entreprise mystificatrice puisqu’elle revient à placer entre toutes les mains les substituts symboliques de privilèges éducatifs et culturels’ (Damisch, 1964), while Sartre and his team, in a famous issue of Les Temps modernes (1965), wondered ‘Les livres de poche sont-ils de vrais livres? Leurs lecteurs sont-ils de vrais lecteurs?’ Julien Gracq, for instance, who won the Prix Goncourt in 1951, would not agree to a paperback edition of his work.

Is the French paperback revolution similar to the emergent shift towards e-books in the contemporary French cultural context? A large readership, mobility, low prices, a fight against privileges and an ‘aristocracy of readers’: the goals seem to be identical. We will have to monitor closely the numbers in order to follow how books and e-books evolve and cohabitate in France into the future.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biographies

Véronique Duché-Gavet is A. R. Chisholm Professor of French at the University of Melbourne. She studies theoretical problems and issues concerning genre (Middle Ages and Renaissance) and translation into French during the Renaissance. Her monograph, Si du mont Pyrenée / N’eussent passé le haut fais … Les romans sentimentaux traduits de l’espagnol en France au XVI^e siècle (2008), focuses on early printing and the dissemination of culture through books.

Bertrand Bourgeois is a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses mainly on French literature and culture of the second half of nineteenth century. He is the author of Poétique de la maison-musée (1848–1898): du réalisme balzacien à l’œuvre d’art décadente (2009) on the influence of private collecting practices on the modern aesthetics of various nineteenth-century French novels.

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