Techniques of bookshop management

Prerequisites : a good level of general and cultural knowledge in the literary field, including analytical skills.

The course will provide students with a short and critical overview of the main approaches to the contemporary bookselling profession and its management. This will include business aspects of bookselling, the bookselling market and its organisational aspects, customer surveys and specific management skills linked to this particular sector.

The pressure between cultural and commercial aspects, which has always existed in the bookselling profession, has increased today with the additional pressures between traditional expertise and the industrialisation of so-called cultural products. Bookshops have become cultural enterprises, each one having specific projects. By the end of the course, the student should be capable of analysing these specific aspects.

The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.

Lecture, evaluated by the writing of a personal analysis on current bookselling business, discussed during an oral examination.

Lecture, evaluated by the writing of a personal analysis on current bookselling business, discussed during an oral examination.

Since the early 19^th century, the bookselling business has been establishing links between publishing supply (upstream) and customers demand (downstream).

At the junction between symbolic and economic capitals underlying the cultural field of books, the bookseller profession undergoes as well tensions between a long standing practice and the globalised industrialization of cultural products. The traditional know-how of bookselling comprises stock, fitting, promotion and management. As for the industrialization of book trade, nowadays it results in publishing overproduction which overloads the booksellers' displays. This situation requires the modification of professional management practices. Moreover, the cultural industry currently experiences a radical transformation towards the digital format.

This course is aimed at giving theoretical tools to students for the analysis of any ongoing bookseller's business plan and for the study of movements in the current book market (notably the e-book market), especially in the Belgian French-speaking area..

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Michel OLLENDORF: Le Métier de libraire. I. La Gestion de stock. Paris, Cercle de la librairie, 2004, 143 p.

Michel OLLENDORF: Le Métier de libraire. II. La Production de l'assortiment. Paris, Cercle de la librairie, 2006, 235 p.

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