Producer Nicolas Lemieux wants to shake the pillars of the temple by offering Ginette Reno’s disc and biography only online and exclusively where you can already find “everything… even a friend”. His proposal does not reinvent the wheel. In 1982, André Lemelin entrusted the exclusivity of the first printing of his Ovid’s Crime splash to food giant Provigo. The middle of the book had protested without seeing its foundations shaken.
We can expect similar results with this coup de force in Jean Coutu. If Lemieux can afford it, he has an ace up his sleeve. Having a Reno in your game is like having a Fiori or a Celine on your list; we can already predict that on her own, Ginette (four-handed with Lambert) risks driving book sales upwards.
Without it, however, Lemieux’s purely business plan to shake up the book chain is windy. And it is perhaps this confusion that is most disturbing.
The businessman is right to say that we must ask ourselves if the book chain is adapted to the present times. But the book is not a consumer good like the others. You can catch one on occasion, between a mascara and antacid capsules, but a national literary production worthy of the name needs dedicated spaces, in bookstores and libraries, where you dispense what you needs light and care to bloom.
Those who denounce a snub to culture are therefore right: it is indeed a disloyal assault against a chain whose balances are necessary for the vitality of our literature. A chain similar to that on which several national cultures in the world are based.
Nicolas Lemieux denies this and makes it more of a question of fairness. In the current ecosystem, he says, the author works for plums (10% of the profits against 40% for the bookseller, 30% for the publisher and 20% for the distributor). He forgets to say that not all the links take the same risk. Shaking up the Book Act to better distribute the charges could still be interesting. But not to give birth to a simplistic and unequivocal solution like the one he proposes here in the wake of his successes with symphonic harmonium.
Quebec books experienced a phenomenal leap in 2021 and maintained their achievements in 2022. At a time when the industry is agitated by the Union des écrivaines et écrivains québécois’s shift towards a union, it does not need let a solitary bully come and teach him a lesson. Especially if it’s just to add to the division.