France wants to create competition for Amazon, Google
November 6, 2009
French publishers and media continue the fight against U.S. cultural onslaught
First the enemy was Hollywood, with the French decrying the “Disneyfication” of Europe and the world (not that this prevented them from opening Euro Disney anyway). Then it was radio and TV stations in France, which were forced to provide a proportional amount of home-grown programming to outweigh the popoular US imports, whether French viewers and listeners wanted it or not. Even advertisers in France were — and are — forced to put French subtitles and translations on commericals and prints ads that use even one English-language word, despite the growing globalization of media and the ubiquity of English as the de facto international language. Some feel the resistance is necessary to preserve French langague and culture from assimilation, while others see it as a futile attempt to deny the inevitability of change, and more evidence of French resentment of the US in general. Even those who agree with the principle of these attempts are dubious about their success.
But now the French are looking to take on the giants of the internet world. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in mid-October, French publisher Editis announced the development of a digital book distribution system, aimed at selling e-books and other digital information products. And France Télécom said it was introducing Web news site that it had been testing for several months with French broadcasters, newspapers and other partners.
The timing was no accident. Google has recently detailed plans for its own online bookstore, scheduled to open next year, and Amazon recently announced it would start selling its Kindle e-book reader outside the US. But French bibliophiles who want to read French language books on the popular electronic device are still out of luck; Kindle readers sold outside the United States will offer only English-language books. That’s because French and other European publishers have so far turned a steadfast cold shoulder to any digital book deals with Amazon.
In the meantime, Google is negotiating in the US with publishers and authors for the right to sell millions of digital books. True to form, publishers in France are crying foul, saying their copyrights and culture are again at risk. By creating their own digital bookstore, French publishers are hoping to fend off the juggernauts of Google and Amazon. But as usual, the French have an enemy in this process: themselves.
The Editis project is at least the third such platform under development in France. Hachette, the biggest French publisher, has already created a separate digital book distribution system; Gallimard, Flammarion and La Martinière are working on their own initiative. Unable to resist competing among themselves, French publishers are scattering the force they would need to combat the marketing muscle and internet reach of the two titans of the online content world.
While French print publishers battle amonst themselves for their slice of the digital gateau, France Télécom’s Orange division has made more progress with its new news aggregator website, called 24/24 Actu — the French nickname for “actualités,” or news. Most leading French newspapers and broadcasters are on board, with the television company TF1 among the only real holdouts.
France Télécom has focused on providing quality content and usability, so it may have a shot in the news competition, even though it is still dwarfed by the wildly popular Google News and Yahoo. 24/24 Actu goes a step further than Google News, gathering audio, video and text-based news reports in one place. A user who clicks on a photo from a story brings up a whole range of coverage on the topic from TV, radio and print outlets, making it a truly useful service that goes deep where Google News goes wide.
24/24 Actu has also taken the step of securing rights agreements from all its news partners, rather than displaying blurbs without copyright permission, as Google News often does. This allows the site to run full-length versions of videos and articles without the fear or infringement or the attending lawsuits, making the site a rich source of information for users. In a true reversal of the usual routine, France Télécom even plans to add English-language news to the service soon, and also hopes to expand it into Spain and the UK.
French publishers looking to compete with Google and Amazon on the book front would do well to follow France Télécom’s model and focus on creating a service valuable enough to French consumer to compete, rather than simply barring US products and services from a public that wants them. In this era of globalization, the ability to lock the gate against the “cultural invader” is diminishing, even if the the stubborn impulse to remain purely French is not.
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