Our commitment

Hachette Livre, a subsidiary of French media giant the Lagardère Group, is a repository of part of France’s cultural heritage. Pushing beyond its historical borders, the company is pursuing the adventure Louis Hachette began in 1826, bringing together a broad spectrum of prestigious publishers covering the entire consumer and education book market. Three words sum up its commitment: variety, independence and responsibility.

The Hachette Livre Group is a constellation of publishers providing fiction and nonfiction, textbooks, travel guides, how-to books, children’s books, dictionaries, comic books and much more. Collectively publishing some 17,000 new titles each year, the Group’s publishers demonstrate their ability to innovate and reinvent themselves. Driven by a shared focus on quality, they comprise a whole that stands out among the major international publishing groups for its impressive variety.

Each of those houses flourishes by cultivating a unique identity, because independence, specific to publishing, breeds creativity. Publishers perform best when they are close to their markets, their authors and their readers.

Boasting a presence in every segment of the publishing world, Hachette Livre operates in three main linguistic regions: the French, English and Spanish markets. The Group also has interests in Russia and the Arab world. That diversity is key to its strength, because it offers protection from turbulent market cycles and ensures balance in its operating performance. Meanwhile, the partworks business, inherently global in nature, spans nearly a dozen languages.

Thus, the Group has powerful resources at its disposal, particularly for meeting challenges such as the ambitions of the digital giants and increasingly concentrated distribution networks.

New trends in reading habits and the emergence of new avenues for promoting and disseminating works, not to mention the growth of digital entertainment, are additional factors that publishers must contend with, but our publishing houses and their teams all foster a spirit of innovation while expanding the audience for authors and books.

Hachette Livre is also embracing businesses on the frontiers of publishing, such as gaming in a variety of formats: the Group has cemented its foothold in video games on mobile devices and board games.

Lastly, Hachette Livre is resolutely tackling a challenge that will shape the future of business: its environmental and social responsibility. Hachette Livre is the first publisher in France to carry out a “scope 3” carbon footprint assessment every three years. The Group is also taking action to promote diversity, in France through its work with Nos Quartiers ont des Talents (NQT), in Britain through the Changing the Story initiative and in the United States with the Read Our World program among others. Its aim is to ensure that in the future readers in every market can see themselves portrayed in the books it offers.

As the third largest trade and educational book publisher in the world, Hachette Livre harnesses the collective power of its range of businesses to take on these challenges for the future with zeal and determination.