France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada

Hachette Livre has over 100,000 square meters of distribution space in France, spread across four sites: Maurepas and Balizy (both just outside Paris), Lyon and Nantes. These facilities handle distribution for third-party and all Group imprints – more than 150 publishers in all. Every day, the Maurepas center and its regional distribution hubs process a million books and ship 20,000 packages to more than 15,000 customers, making Hachette Livre the largest book distributor in France. Hachette Livre also has a distribution center in Belgium. A sales force markets the books to the various distribution channels (bookstores, chain stores, supermarkets, online outlets) in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. As ebook-stores and ereaders pour into the global market, Hachette Livre Distribution is prepared with an integrated digital distribution service open to all types of platforms. Developed by the Group’s French, Spanish, British and American innovation teams and leveraging the latest, most high-performance technologies, this distribution system also offers extra services (such as file conversion and saving, big data management, anti-piracy measures and commercial reporting) available to both Group publishers and other interested publishers, whether or not they are clients of Hachette Livre Distribution.

In addition, Hachette Livre Distribution has introduced new services for publishers, including a print-on-demand service launched jointly with Lightning Source, the worldwide market leader. The Lightning Source France unit is located at the Maurepas distribution facility. In 2018, Hachette Livre Distribution developed Ritméo, a smart tool for print-run management integrated into its distribution system, so that publishers have access to the inventory they need at all times.