France’s National Book Center (the CNL) just released its annual report on the health of the country’s bookstores, and let’s say it right away: 2025 marks a bit of a turning point. This is a French situation, but it’s a worrying one worth paying attention to.
For the first time in years, more are closing than opening
In 2025, France saw 83 openings against 85 closures. The net balance has therefore gone into the red, something never seen since the CNL began tracking these figures (so, since the COVID years).
On top of that, 57 bookstores changed hands (buyouts).
The end of the post-Covid euphoria
Remember: between 2021 and 2023, France was seeing a real boom in new bookstore openings. Now comes the landing. Openings dropped 38% compared to 2024 (falling from 135 to 83), nearly half as many as during the record years.
It’s mainly the specialized bookstores that are suffering, and general-interest stores now account for more than 4 out of every 5 openings.
One nice point all the same: new stores keep favoring small towns.
In fact, 56% of new bookstores set up in towns of fewer than 15,000 people, often in rural, tourist, or suburban areas. So coverage across the country keeps getting denser far from the big cities. But maybe this also explains why bookstores are closing more than usual? Because in 2025, more than one closure in two happened in a town of fewer than 15,000 people. There’s something here worth digging into.
On closures, the level stays high but is stabilizing
There were 85 bookstore closures in France in 2025, in line with 2023-2024. The recurring pattern: these are mostly recent businesses (48% opened since 2017, 38% since 2021 alone) and small operations doing less than about $215,000 in annual revenue.
In short, the young and fragile projects, often started by people switching careers, are the ones struggling to weather the storm.
Bookstore buyouts in 2025
With 57 buyouts (more than 80% of them general-interest stores), this mechanism remains the real safeguard for the survival of the network. The CNL and the ADELC (a French association supporting independent bookstores) give them special attention, especially when a store matters to its local area or to the diversity of what gets published.
How do we explain this?
None of this is cheerful, and the decline in the number of bookstores in France is not good news.
It can be explained by fixed costs that keep climbing, sales in decline (both in value and in volume), and a rough start to 2026 with -6% in the first quarter. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the year.
To sum up: after years of growth fueled by the post-Covid period, the sector is taking a big breath and entering a phase of stabilization. Neighborhood bookstores in small towns are holding on, but the economic balance remains tense.
I’d also note that the COVID years and the lockdown periods were good times for e-readers and digital reading, with higher sales during those stretches than in other years. And, as if by chance, that also lines up with the wave of bookstore openings that followed. So there’s a link between digital reading and reading on paper: it’s not a single pie being cut into slices (one slice for ebooks, one for supermarkets, one for bookstores, one for e-commerce, and so on), but a pie that can get bigger. Unfortunately, in 2025, the pie got smaller.
Leave a Reply