The hour of the literary re-entry has come. With it, 490 new novels land on the shelves of booksellers until October. In the town of Lagny-sur-Marne (Seine-et-Marne), the huge warehouse of Sodis, the third French distributor, is in turmoil: men and machines are busy delivering the 2022 vintage on time. palettes and boxes that lets glimpse the names of unknown authors, suddenly propelled under the lights of literary Paris.
But this place founded by Gallimard in 1971 also manages the dark side of the trade: the return of unsold items, which sometimes end up being shredded by a large, noisy and violent electromechanical machine: the pestle. A subject that publishers do not like to broach very much.
At a time of energy sobriety, the 42,229 tons of books returned on average each year to the distributor are a stain. “We know that we must avoid wasting too much paper, because it amounts to wasting energy, when it is increasingly scarce”, recognizes Pascal Lenoir, chairman of the environmental commission of the SNE (National publishing union) and director of production at Gallimard.
A logic of overproduction
In the returns building, the books that have not found buyers aggregate on a mechanical belt. A young woman inspects them before throwing them under a robot. The fate reserved for them is settled in a few seconds, the time for the machine to read a barcode indicating whether or not the book is unfit for sale. Depending on the answer, some find the stocks, others land in dumpsters made available by the “external operators” or others “recyclers”.
“Everything is recycled, of course, but it still represents a destruction of value. To make a book, we cut down trees, we use a lot of water…” Thomas Bout, director of Rue de l’Echiquier publishing
According to the SNE’s October 2021 survey, 5.4% of unsold items are returned to inventory for restocking, while 13.2% – or 26,300 tonnes – are sent to the pestle to become recycled paper, packaging cardboard or, more surprisingly, toilet paper. “Everything is recycled, of course, but it still represents a destruction of values. To make a book, we cut down trees, we use a lot of water…”, relief Thomas Bout, director of Rue de l’Echiquier editions. To make one kilo of paper, 500 liters of water are needed, according to the International Office for Water.
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