Bookstores across Belgium are finding themselves in a desperate struggle to cope with the country's soaring inflation rate, RTBF has reported.
The report noted that decreasing consumer demand for books, coupled with the inability of bookshops to pass on rising production costs to consumers, is inflicting severe economic harm upon Belgium's booksellers and distributors.
"In a bookstore, when you enter it, practically 90% of the books that are on sale are books that are imported from France," explained Benoît Dubois, the Director of the Association of Belgian Book Publishers. "And therefore, the pricing policy is the one that is practised in Paris. However, the inflation rate between France and Belgium is gigantic."
According to the latest Belgian and EU data, Belgium's annual inflation rate in October was 13.1%, up from 12.1% in September — a figure which is significantly greater than the EU average rate of 11.5% (up from 10.9% in September). France ran the lowest inflation rate within the bloc last month, at 7.1%.
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Dubois added: "Distributors and booksellers cannot pass on [the increased production costs], and this is even more serious since they are currently experiencing an erosion of their sales. [Belgian] publishers do not dare to increase their price to the real value of inflation, since they are competing with French publishers who are barely increasing the selling price of their books."
Dubois also noted that the much remarked-upon uptick in book purchases during the first Covid lockdown has long since dissipated: book sales are now 10% lower than what they were during the initial stages of the pandemic.
"If the erosion of sales continues, there may be very big problems for bookstores," Dubois warned.
