The book was supposed to be released on the 2020-04-01.
As things stand, it came out as a bad April’s Fool joke, due to the COVID-19 pandemic suspending the official release.
This had two impacts:
- the french paper mills, like many industries, have a hard time producing enough to cover basic needs for paper (healthcare, packaging), and focus on producing for these specific downstream industries rather than books.
- traditional bookstores are under administrative shutdown since before the general quarantine. Releasing the book during that period would place them in an unequal footing with online book distributions, and the biggest of them all specifically.
Since the actual duration of the pandemic and quarantine in France is still unknown, the initial release had to be postponed without a specific new release date: one will be decided once the health and economy in France returns more or less to normal.
To this date, it seems this will mean early in the summer: late June, maybe July.
We considered releasing only the digital versions (PDF and ePub), but eventually renounced the idea, to avoid any distortion of competition between traditional bookstores and e-tailers.
On the plus side, it means you know what to read on the beach this summer 😉.