The incredible resilience of books in the midst of the health crisis
PIERRE LEROY
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Hachette Livre
2020 was a year of multiple overlapping crises, such as the global pandemic, the socio-economic crisis and increased awareness of the impact of human activity on biodiversity.
The unprecedented health crisis prompted us to think about our employees’ health and safety and also forced us to take on a number of challenges relating to our business activities.
Hachette Livre is not like other companies as its raw materials – if we can call them that – in each country in which it operates, are knowledge, culture, and learning. This is both a considerable and specific responsibility, as guardians of an unparalleled intellectual heritage that it is our duty to protect, allow it to prosper and offer to the world in the most accessible way possible. And this responsibility has increased during this unprecedented year.
With schools closing, our educational publishers took action to ensure continuity of learning. We also helped our customers by guaranteeing effective dissemination and distribution services while also continuing to innovate. Our publishers and their authors were thus able to satisfy people’s huge appetite for reading in 2020.
This was achieved despite the health crisis and the resulting closures of bookshops in many countries. The crisis demonstrated the extent to which books play an essential role in the life of our citizens, opening the doors to new knowledge and offering a way of decoding the world and its ideas, as well as providing a means of escapism.
In 2020, a number of initiatives were launched in order to promote the different viewpoints, life experiences and journeys related in the books we publish, as well as their accessibility to wider audiences.
As a publisher, our aim remains unchanged: to discover, publish and accompany authors in their diversity in order to encourage people to want to read and give current and future generations the freedom of thought.
Hachette Livre head office (Vanves, France).
“Encouraging people to want to read and giving current and future generations the freedom of thought.”
Pierre Leroy