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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

"The Patient is More Dead than Alive"

15 December, 1998 - 00:00

I will not even try to imagine who could come up with the idea of celebrating
the millennium of book-publishing in Ukraine. The accuracy of the date
is touchingly reminiscent of Kyiv's 1982 "1,500 year jubilee," making one
wonder sorrowfully about people in Rus' staying illiterate for 500 long
years. But of course, the jubilee was engineered with the best of intentions:
somehow to attract the government's attention to the condition of book
publishing in Ukraine.

In Russia, no one knows about this jubilee, although they respect Nestor
the Chronicler as much as we do. Of course, book publishing there is, to
put it mildly, in better shape.

And now I will ask all my readers to take a seat, lest they injure their
heads when fainting after hearing what I am about to say.  In 1997,
the number of book titles printed Ukraine finally reached the level of
1958 and in terms of the number of copies the level of 1940. In 1997, Ukraine
published seven times fewer books than Russia (both titles and copies)
and 11 times fewer books for children in terms of titles and 33 times (!)
in terms of print run. Are you still with me? Have some more statistics.
In the first ten months of this year Ukraine published ten times fewer
book titles than Russia and 51 times fewer copies. You want precise figures?
Be my guest: 1,406,000 copies in Ukraine and 71,849,000 in Russia. Who
is to blame for this outrage? Perhaps the collapse of the USSR? A Russian
lobby in the Ukrainian Parliament? Financial crisis? Saddam Hussein and
Bill Clinton trying to get even? The Internet? I talked to a number of
people when preparing this article and none agreed with any of the above
suggestions. They all said taxes. Everyone in the publishing business knows
that paper supplied from Syktyvkar is better and less expensive than that
produced at Zhidach (both in Russia), that there are no affordable printing
dyes, that printing film costs too much, that our equipment is obsolete
and worn out, but the biggest problem is taxation.

In 1992, on the wave-crest of newly proclaimed independence, Parliament
passed a bill whereby publishers putting out over 70% of their output in
Ukrainian were exempt from the income tax. Such bliss was short lived,
for in 1993 book-publishing was put on an equal par with trade in Italian
shoes or Czech wallpaper. In 1997, the value added tax law was enacted
with its infamous clause exempting "sales of book of domestic manufacture."
However, before selling such books they had to be made. To make them one
has to buy dyes, paper, film, equipment, pay royalties, and editor's fees.
By the time a Ukrainian book is subject to this exemption it cannot sell
at less than two dollars. In Russia, the cost at this stage is 75 cents. 
Moreover, in Russia books are exempt from both VAT and income tax, meaning
that a Ukrainian publisher has to pay another 30%. So what does Saddam
Hussein, the USSR's collapse, or the financial crisis have to do with this?
We are building our own future, aren't we? One more thing. In Russia, a
book is tax-exempt all the way from buying ink to the bookstore, from buying
paper to shipping the books off to Ukraine.

If only we could blame all this on our treacherous neighbor and say
just look at them! Crisis or no crisis, they are up to their old dirty
tricks, showering Ukraine with cheap paperbacks. But in Poland, Hungary,
and elsewhere in Europe books have the same privileges as in Russia. What
is more, they are trying to make Ukraine sign the Florentine Convention
and Nighbor Protocol of 1976 exempting from customs duties all reference,
scientific, scholarly, and special literature. If the convention were signed
with our state maintaining its current attitude to the domestic publisher,
it would be tantamount to a death verdict for the latter. He would simply
not survive the competition.

Now as for the language in which books are published. This author knows
for certain that the Book Chamber's statistics show Ukrainian to be dominant.
Thus, in 1997 the number of Ukrainian language books and booklets surpassed
that of Russian language editions by 33%. As for print run, the ratio was
lower: 21%. Fiction literature, however, showed the opposite: 7% more Russian
language editions and 1.5 times the print run.

But all this is official statistics. When I asked Mykola Senchenko,
director of the Book Chamber, a man I hold in the highest esteem, 
whether he could tell, even roughly, how many pirate editions there were
in Ukraine, he just spread his hands helplessly. I received similar answers
from all of my fellow countrymen I asked about book imports from Russia
(meaning not only the legal ones, of course), although all agreed that
there are 10-15% Ukrainian books on the national market. Considering that
Ukraine published 6,308 and Russia 45,026 book titles in 1997, it is not
difficult to guess who is reading the remaining 38,718 books.

I am not saying that no one is worried about the condition of book publishing
in Ukraine which is best described using the phrase "The patient is more
dead than alive." The President signed an edict on July 23, titled On Certain
Aspects of the Government Support of Publishing Affairs. Among other things,
he instructed the Cabinet  to prepare "in keeping with established
procedures" draft laws easing the tax burden on publishers and recommended
the authorities managing public property at all levels to arrange for tax
exemptions for publishers and distributors. Fine, but preventive medicine
cannot help you when you are already sick. I often recommend my daughter
to pay more attention to her math with results I would rather not discuss.
In any case, the Ministry of Information duly submitted a draft (one of
several I have seen) suggesting such preferential terms  to the former
Derzhkomvydav (State Publishing Committee) and did it before November 1,
as instructed by the President. On October 5, the Ministry of Information
(Derzhkomvydav's legal successor) received a response from the State Tax
Administration, signed by Deputy Head Operenko, which read as a disguised
rejection. On October 22 another message arrived, signed by another Deputy
Head, Mr. Lopata, spelling it out; no income tax exemption, no VAT exemption,
maybe concerning preferential copyright terms. Was this a case of the left
hand not knowing what the right one is doing? Unlikely. Just another example
of the bureaucratic skill of going through the motions of caring for the
domestic publishing trade.

Speaking of taxes, the entire Ukrainian book publishing system contributes
not more than Hr 100 million annually. Ideally. I suspect that the amount
equals that spent on the "renovation" of Khreshchatyk. In other words,
one or two such renovation projects would suffice to put Ukrainian book
publishing back on its feet. And 3-5 such projects would allow it to reach
a more or less decent level, putting out the required amount of literature
in Ukrainian without any stupid (and unconstitutional, mind you!) 50% Ukrainian
language quotas set forth in the currently invalid publishing law.

Perhaps they are out of their minds in Russia: with the crisis and all
they have reaffirmed their publishers' privileges that will remain effective
until the year 2003. Why should Russia need so many books? Are they actually
reading them or what?

 

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