The Île-de-France region continues to offer digital school content similar to its former "free textbooks" in Ile-de-France high schools, private publishers denounced to France Culture on Tuesday, November 3, while administrative justice had ordered it to withdraw these textbooks no later than November 2. The region headed by Valérie Pécresse (LR) has been publishing and offering free digital school textbooks to Ile-de-France high schools for several years, presented as "free" and modifiable by teachers and students, accessible on an online platform, Pearltrees. Private publishers, via their association Les Editeurs d'enseignement, had denounced unfair competition.
Contacted by France Culture, the Île-de-France region ensures that it has complied with the court decision and removed its textbooks from the Pearltrees platform. However, Pearltrees has since become a publisher and now offers high school students in the Ile-de-France region textbooks whose content is substantially identical to that of the region's old textbooks. “Of course there is common content between the old open textbooks published by the Île-de-France region and the new open textbooks published by Pearltrees,” recognizes Patrice Lamotte, CEO of Pearltrees. The platform claims one and a half million users for its content among teachers and students. It is now developing its paid offers for colleges.
“It’s a misuse of the court decision, they are the same textbooks but the cover is Pearltrees,” denounces Me Emmanuel Glaser, the lawyer for the association Les Éditeurs d’enseignement, which represents 32 private publishers. The latter deplore to France Culture an 80% drop in their income in Île-de-France. “The region is responsible by law for the maintenance of buildings, not for publishing school textbooks,” recalls the lawyer. He emphasizes that it is impossible to know, from the region's accounts, the cost of creating these manuals.
Unfair competition for private publishers
Since 2019, the region led by Valérie Pécresse (LR) has embarked on a vast enterprise to digitize high schools, equipping students with tablets and computers. In 2023, it concluded an 18 million euro deal with the Pearltrees platform to distribute digital school content designed by it. It thus offered free digital school textbooks to Ile-de-France high schools, presented as “free” and modifiable by teachers and students, accessible on Pearltrees.
The initiative aroused opposition from private textbook publishers, who denounced unfair competition, while these “free textbooks” replaced paper ones in half of the 468 high schools in Île-de-France. The publishers obtained a legal victory on May 26: the Montreuil administrative court declared illegal the publication of these digital textbooks by the region on the Pearltrees platform. The Region appealed the decision, a procedure on the merits is still underway. In mid-September, the Paris administrative court of appeal, in a ruling consulted by AFP, set November 2 as the deadline for withdrawing textbooks.
In the meantime, Valérie Pécresse's initiative has been taken up by the Brittany region. According to information from France Culture, the Brittany region, chaired by Loïg Chesnais-Girard (DVG), has also adopted, via Pearltrees, the digital textbooks initially designed by the Île-de-France region. A measure criticized by certain parents, including Florent Souillot, co-founder and president of the association Rève les yeux, which fights against screen addiction. “You memorize better from a printed textbook,” he says. At the microphone of France Culture, he calls for imitating the Scandinavian countries which "are going backwards and who have decided to stop equipping classes digitally, to return to printed school textbooks."
Other voices are pleading for public money devoted to the digitization of high schools to finance public and free platforms, like Éléa, rather than private platforms like Pearltrees.
