So it was nice to read an article in the 8th issue of Five Dials about the French bookselling industry, which seems to be in fairly good health. There are a startling 792 bookshops in Paris, and 3,000 independent bookshops in France employing about 13,000 people. In New York City there are now only 10 independent bookshops.

This is not an accident. The French government (both national and local) has taken the view that books are not a commodity like any other, but are important enough to national culture to be given special status. Bookshops, too, are seen as valuable, desirable things, and 2007′s ‘plan livre’ set out  a series of measures to help independent bookshops survive (e.g. tax relief, interest-free loans, etc.). There’s also a law preventing the big chains from indulging in massive discounting (it sounds a lot like the old Net Book Agreement in the UK, which was abolished in 1997). The City of Paris actively intervenes to protect the character of certain neighbourhoods, for example by buying up buildings and renting the retail space to bookshops for minimal rent. The idea is to stop gentrification and rising rents from pricing out the traditional businesses that make the place what it is.

French publishers, of course, are suffering from the economic downturn like anyone else. But they took on less debt than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, so have taken less of a hit. I’m sure that there are other problems and that the French publishing industry is not a perfect model, but it does seem to be in better shape than ours. Perhaps instead of penning more articles about the dire straits we’re in, we could instead look across the Channel and get a few ideas?

It really wasn’t. How could it be? Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs stated that when basic needs are satisfied, people can move on to meet their higher level needs – intellectual, spiritual, social, existential. Schumaker quotes from 1950s intellectuals full of hope about the “people of tomorrow” and how wise and fulfilled they would be now that their basic human needs had (in the West) been taken care of.

But Maslow’s theory broke down. We are the people of tomorrow, we have more stuff than anybody’s ever had before, and we are so stupid and self-absorbed that we can’t even bring ourselves to care about our imminent destruction of the planet (voting on the X-Factor, now, that’s a different story). We are trivial. We are foolish. We are willfully ignorant. We have the attention span of a hyperactive toddler stoked up on M&Ms. We are lost.

Schumaker is spot-on with his descriptions (“drowning in our own shallowness”, “human potential taking a back seat to economic potential”, “self-absorption on a spectacular scale”) and doesn’t shy away from naming “our dangerously obsolete socio-economic system” as the prime cause. He’s a bit light on solutions, apart from vague-sounding talk of “global consciousness”, but he gives some web links to “culture change” strategists that sound interesting. I will investigate them, if I can muster the attention span.