"The Patient is More Dead than Alive"

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(both in Russia), that there are no affordable printing dyes, that printing film costs too much, that our equipment is obsolete and worn out, but the biggest problem is taxation.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?