Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Business Of Letters

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Business Of Letters

    BUSINESS OF LETTERS
    By Roland Oliphant

    Russia Profile
    October 7, 2009

    Statistics Show that the Russian Book Market Is Growing while the
    Number of Consumers is Shrinking

    Although Russians are still ranked as one of the most literate nations
    in the world, ever fewer of them actually buy books.

    The numbers look good: over the past several years, publishers
    have begun releasing more titles and printing more copies of
    them. According to the Russian Chamber of Books--Russia's national
    library and also the agency responsible for statistics concerning the
    Russian publishing industry--in 2006 Russian publishers put out more
    than 100,000 different titles (of all kinds--both books and pamphlets)
    for the first time in Russian history. By 2008 that figure had reached
    123,336 titles, including 105,093 books. The national print run was
    760.44 million, 590.36 million of which were books (a book is defined
    as a non-periodical publication of more than 48 pages. A pamphlet is
    from five to 48 pages.)

    But the picture painted by such statistics is crude at best, warns
    Konstantin Sukhorukov, the head of the Book Chamber's Bibliography
    and Scientific Collection and editor of the Bibliography journal. And
    if they are used to describe a "profitable and dynamic industry,"
    they are misleading.

    The Book Chamber's statistics are based on the size of its collection
    as the national book depository, and the printing figures publishers
    provide. "These figures only show how many titles are produced and how
    many copies are printed; they can show how many of these are produced
    by commercial versus non-commercial operations, but they certainly do
    not show how many have been sold," he said. "We often get criticized
    by representatives of the book industry for producing misleadingly
    optimistic figures. But the truth is, we can't talk about the 'market'
    with any certainty, because there is no one in Russia responsible
    for book trade statistics."

    One factor blurring the image is the number of commercial ve f Russian
    publishing changed unrecognizably with the fall of the Soviet Union,
    when the state-owned publishing houses that had monopolized the
    industry were broken up in the early 1990s. They were replaced by
    a host of smaller firms, and today it is estimated that there are
    some 5,000 publishing houses--that is, commercial organizations--in
    the country. (A report produced by the Federal Service for Press
    and Mass Communications and the Anglo-Russian culture and arts
    foundation Academica Rossica said "over 5,000." The Book Chamber,
    however, estimates that not more than 4,000 to 5,000 of those who
    have publishing licenses actually produce anything).

    But add in the universities, scientific institutions, museums,
    libraries and various branches of government that maintain their
    own publishing units, and the number of organizations publishing
    in one form or another is around 25,000 to 35,000, estimated
    Sukhorukov. Furthermore, Russian publishers tend to operate across the
    former Soviet Union wherever there is a substantial Russian-language
    market. Eksmo, for example, has distribution centers in Russia,
    Ukraine and Kazakhstan. That makes it difficult to talk about the
    industry inside one particular state's borders.

    Yet despite all these caveats, it does look as if the market is
    growing. Retail and wholesale prices rose some 15 percent in 2009
    compared to 2008. Niche sectors have done particularly well, with
    students and other consumers of specialist literature continuing to buy
    up-to-date editions rather than rely on hand-me-downs and ill-equipped
    libraries. "That's a tendency we've seen for several years, and
    despite the crisis it seems to be continuing," said Sokhorukov.

    The end of the book hunger

    A number of dramatic shifts occurred in Russian publishing in the early
    1990s. The break-up of the state publishing houses opened the field
    for smaller, independent firms, and a great many appeared. These new
    publishers had a huge demand to meet. By the end of the Soviet Union,
    what the American scholars " had reached epidemic proportions. The
    lifting of censorship restrictions sparked a frenzy in printing,
    as the new publishers scrambled to meet the demand of a readership
    starved of hitherto forbidden or simply unavailable literature. There
    was an especially fierce dash to bring foreign works to market,
    securing translations and (sometimes) the rights to them.

    Not all followed the trend. Eksmo, today the largest Russian publisher,
    tracks its success to its "bet on Russia." "The foreign authors who
    then dominated the market were mostly bad translations, and often
    did not even have the rights to publication," says Eksmo's official
    history. "The turning point came when the publishing house began
    working with Russian writers."

    While the number of publishing houses proliferated, the number of
    books collapsed. But that was not as paradoxical, or as catastrophic,
    as one might think. Practicality no longer required the publication
    of reams of party-authorized material. And, once the initial "book
    hunger" was quenched, it never quite returned. Gone is the almost
    complete reliance on the book for both entertainment, information and
    escape. The newspaper and magazine market has exploded; the Internet
    is increasingly accessible (though with only around 30 percent of
    penetration, it remains out of reach for many); there is a wide choice
    of radio and television stations. Reliable supplies and alternative
    ways of getting hold of literature (like the Internet) mean that the
    phenomenon of the "sensational" book that would fly off the shelves
    declined. That not only affected demand, but caused profound cultural
    change. "The book itself has quite a different function in our society
    in comparison with Soviet times," Sukhorukov said.

    Made in Moscow

    Despite the large number of independent publishers, the market is
    increasingly consolidated. Of the 4,000 to 5,000 estimated commercial
    operations, the top 25 publishers account for 65,000 or more titles
    annually--at least 50 percent of all production. At the very top sits
    Eksmo, which claims to account for some 15 percent of the Russian book
    market and edged ahead of its nearest rival, AST, in the past couple of
    years. The biggest operators tend to have diverse operations. Eksmo
    and AST both publish fiction, academic and professional works,
    and children's books, all fields that require different business
    models. Others have found success through specialization. Flamingo,
    also in the top 25, has maintained its focus on children's books since
    it was founded in 1990. At the other end of the scale are extremely
    small outfits, often with only two or three staff who produce only
    a couple of titles a year, usually in some specialized scientific or
    academic field.

    But the biggest imbalances in the industry are geographic. The
    publishing industry is heavily concentrated in Moscow, where some
    60 percent of all titles are published, and ninety percent of the
    national print run is produced. At one time the price of a book could
    be almost directly correlated with its distance away from Moscow,
    thanks to transport costs and the costs incurred by each wholesaler
    and retailer added to the supply chain. Nowadays prices still fluctuate
    regionally, but far more erratically.

    Unlike in the West, the practice of publishers printing a recommended
    retail price on a book's cover is rare. And the lack of fixed prices
    or any other regulation means that regional differences in supply
    and demand, and input costs like staff wages and shop rental space,
    can freely feed into the retail price of a book. A rule of thumb
    would say that it reverses the previous trend--in the capital,
    retail space, staff wages, demand and prices in general are much
    higher than in the regions. But that rule does not hold fast. "The
    same title in Moscow could cost twice or half as much elsewhere,"
    said Sukhorukov. "And that variation is not only between regions,
    but between bookshops in the same city."

    Demography bites

    Contemporary publishers' gravest problem is one that plagues other
    industries as well: as Russia's demographic crisis persists, the
    reading population declines - fewer children are born and become
    readersBut despite all this, more titles are now published, and more
    copies of them printed, than at any time during the Soviet Union. The
    quantity continues to grow year by year, and, as far as can be told,
    demand is holding up despite the effects of the financial crisis. But
    the book trade is now threatened by a more relentless enemy: time.

    Publishers (and traditionalists) everywhere lament the decline in
    the reading population. It can be attributed to all manner of modern
    evils--the rise of the Internet, computer games, light entertainment,
    the pressures and demands of mo cy. But the trend is clear. Fewer
    people are reading, and fewer children are becoming readers.

    Should something be done to address the "problem"? A look at world
    literacy rankings suggests that the panic about declining culture may
    well be imagined. The United Nations Development Program report for
    2007 to 2008 estimated Russia's literacy rate at 99.4 percent; ahead
    of the United States and Britain, and alongside several other former
    Soviet republics. Indeed, the upper ranks of the literacy league are
    dominated by countries that were once part of the Soviet Union (Russia
    shares 11th place with Armenia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan). Books may
    have lost the role they had in Soviet society, but the legacy seems
    to endure.

    Publishers, of course, are more concerned about customers than readers,
    and they are not quite the same thing. Russians may be amongst the
    most literate people in the world, but only around half of them
    actually buy books. That decline is aggravated by Russia's ongoing
    demographic crisis. The country's population is shrinking at a rate
    of some 1 million a year, and not only are older readers being lost at
    an alarming speed, but fewer children are being born to replace them.

    There's not much the publishers can do about that, of course,
    but the rate of decline is such that if it cannot be reversed,
    the publishing houses may find themselves forced to compete for a
    shrinking market. That's a long-term threat, and by no means unique
    to publishing, but it is a serious one.

    There are other problems; copyright protection, long the scourge of
    the film industry, is also difficult to enforce in literature. There
    will be no return to the "book famine" of the last years of the Soviet
    Union, but in some regions it is still difficult to get access to high
    quality, modern works. At the moment, however, these are peripheral.

    It is probably sensible to expect the top publishing
    houses--particularly Eksmo and AST--to continue to extend their
    domination of the market. They are better positioned to sis, and
    their long reach allows them to sell all over the country. In the
    long term, they will also be more resilient to the pressures of the
    population decline.
Working...
X