The Bookseller.com

1st December 2008

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French chain condemns exclusive Sony deal

12.09.08 Barbara Cassasus

Hachette Livre and French chain Fnac have entered into an exclusive arrangement with Sony that will allow them to sell the Sony Reader for €300 across the country from October. But the deal has been condemned by rival French chain Virgin Megastore, which claims that the move could further "hamper the development of supply for legal downloading".

Hachette Livre declined to comment on Virgin's protest ahead of the joint press conference to be held next Tuesday by the Sony France, Fnac and Hachette Livre chief executives, Philippe Citroën, Christophe Cuvillier and Arnaud Nourry, to announce the marketing plans for the launch of the Sony Reader in France next month.

Under the agreement, Fnac will retail the Sony Reader for about €300 in its stores and online. The price will include two downloaded books of the buyer's choice from Hachette’s digital catalogue.

Laurent Fiscal, Virgin Megastore's deputy managing director in charge of strategy and markets, said: "Our experience of more than seven years in distributing digital music and video has demonstrated on several occasions that exclusive arrangements hamper the development of supply for legal downloading." The group's subsidiary VirginMega, which claims to rank second to I-Tunes for online music distribution in France, is working on a digital book project that would be open to all publishers, he said. "It is regrettable that market leader Hachette Livre takes the responsibility" for hampering supply, without analysing the errors committed in other sectors such as music, which have fostered piracy and restricted legal access to the internet, Virgin added.

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