Experts name 23 biggest wartime problems of Ukrainian book publishing

During a public discussion of book publishing and distribution organized by the RES-POL project with the Ukrainian Book Institute, experts named 23 problems encountered in the book publishing sector.

The RES-POL project conducted a series of in-depth interviews with industry players and analysts this spring, and the Ukrainian Book Institute organized a strategic session for market participants. As a result, the experts defined essential issues in the book publishing sector:

Human resources and professionals:

• Lack of personnel due to martial law (a cross-cutting problem for the state and SMEs in particular);
• Key professionals within printing houses (many of whom are not exempt from military service);
• Complications with attracting nomadic specialists are related to the uncertainty of their tax residency and the irrelevance of Ukrainian salaries to expenses abroad;
• Lack of qualified specialists, especially with working knowledge of English, especially in the areas of grant management, copyright, and international negotiations;
• Lack of leverage to enforce the translation rates approved by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the resultant dumping and lowering of quality standards.

Infrastructure and funding:

• Threatened infrastructure (Kharkiv printing houses in particular). Infrastructure critical to the industry is not recognized as critical to the state;
• Inability to borrow at interest rates of 5-7-9% due to lack of assets that can be pledged as collateral.

Business environment and institutions:

• Market instability and dumping wars. Discussion of the feasibility of establishing a cover price (a suggested retail price) and mechanisms for its implementation in the context of inflation;
• Lack of funding from approved instruments of state support for the industry (such as reimbursement of rent to bookstores);
• Questions about a program for rent reimbursement to bookstores in light of the risk of its favoring large chain players rather than independent bookstores in small towns;
• Lack of literary agencies (internal and external). Lack of understanding of the global market by authors, publishers, and agents;
• Financial and logistical inaccessibility of trips abroad for most industry players;
• Lack of high-quality and up-to-date statistics on the book industry and market;
• Lack of professional associations and exchange of professional experience;
• Lack of formal and informal training and professional development programs that meet market needs.

Interaction with other industries, the creative community, and consumers:

• Lack of new Ukrainian authors who write in various genres;
• Lack of professional translators of literary texts from all languages into Ukrainian and lack of translators from Ukrainian in the international market;
• Lack of a regulatory framework for interaction with translators in the fields of copyright and visibility;
• Piracy and counterfeiting (paper, electronic, and audio books, YouTube videos, Russian publications, foreign editions). Lack of understanding of copyright protection by the general public;
• Insufficient numbers of awards, professional media, and critics;
• Low integration of books into other creative industries (e.g., selling licenses for movies, computer games, clothing prints). Lack of understanding of copyright in these categories;
• Lack of relevant professional and technical literature in Ukrainian due to the complexity and unprofitability of such projects for publishers;
• High cost of foreign books, in particular due to VAT (value-added tax) on book imports and partial shadowing of imports.

According to the organizers, the next step is to rank the problems and summarize study results.

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Main image: ucsc.org.ua

Copy editing: Joy Tataryn, Terra Friedman King