Merger of AST and Eksmo

There have been reports that Russia's two largest publishing houses, Eksmo and AST, are merging. We asked a number of editors and publishers to comment on this news.

Ivan Okhapkin, New Scientist RU magazine, editor-in-chief

The consumption of e-books is growing from year to year. On the other hand, people are reading less and less—alternative sources of information and entertainment are successfully competing for their attention. It cannot be ruled out that the merger of two large publishing houses is one of the first major events that resulted from these trends. If a competitor leaves the market, this will help increase sales, which (this is just an assumption, since I don’t have numbers) are gradually falling due to the above reasons.

Egor Bykovsky, editor-in-chief of the journal “Science in Focus”

The news about the merger of AST and Eksmo is rather sad. Not only because, from general considerations, competition is better than a monopoly, and two monsters are more useful for the market than just one, which took advantage of the moment and swallowed the second, weakened by the fight with the tax service. But there are also private consequences that, I’m afraid, will quickly follow. Firstly, “AST” was (at least it seems to me) somewhat more humane, or something. There were several excellent “sub-publishing houses” inside, like Corpus under the leadership of Varvara Gornostaeva, or the editorial office of Shubina, which did very correct things and published very correct and good books. Since during mergers the combined structure always loses weight, I am afraid that not the most commercial projects will simply be cut down.

Secondly, while there were two monsters and they fought each other with all their might, they pumped the market with money, fought for authors, overpaid them, sometimes seriously, just to outbid their competitor. Now there will be no such need, royalties will fall, perhaps some unnecessary series will disappear (this is good, however), the profit margin will increase, and this extra money, it is possible, will be directed to the e-book trade market. Which will lead to their rise in price on average, don’t even doubt it. And thirdly, the two giants were not only publishers, but also major book distributors. Now they will merge their store chains, and I don’t think that this will be good for small publishers dealing with paper books. However, we'll see.

Vladimir Vaksman, Vek 2 publishing house, editor-in-chief

I would like to point out two things. First, how will the merger of two large publishing houses affect the publication of new books? It seems to me that if we talk about books that are potentially most interesting to the readers of TrV-Science, it will not be reflected in any way. Neither AST nor Eksmo determined the weather in the field of scientific and popular science literature - this was and is in the sphere of interests of mainly small publishing houses.

However, and this is secondly, there is no point in publishing books without prospects of selling them. And here, for small publishing houses, the more important circumstance is not the merger of the AST and Eksmo publishing houses, but the merger of the retail networks they control, since small publishing houses are forced to sell their books through these networks. AST and Eksmo had different policies regarding the sales of books from other publishers. It is not yet clear which position will prevail after the unification and, it seems to me, will become clear no earlier than in a year.

Alexander Samsonov, editor-in-chief of the magazine “Ecology and Life”

In the early 2000s, one of the vice-presidents of AST, speaking at the Frankfurt fair in front of participants in the collective stand of Russia (about 20 small publishing houses participated in it), said: “We will eat you all - the market will be ours, it will be divided by several large ones.” publishing houses." Well, his prediction came true, but, as it turned out recently, “AST” is also going to be eaten.

What does this story say? It is possible that the process of monopolizing the book market has gone so successfully and so far that even the creators of this process have become its victims. The process has moved towards the consolidation and industrial development of the publishing industry, small publishing houses have almost died out, and popular science magazines are also dying out.

Is it good or bad? Let's look at other industries. If an industry is strategically important and a monopoly is possible in it, then a state corporation is created to manage it. The state task of innovative modernization should probably have book and journal support, and in this sense, a state corporation in the field of science and its popularization is quite possible.

The networks have their own marketing policy, which consists of the succinct phrase “what people get, they give it to them,” to the point of saturation, to the point of disgust. However, in this case there is a clear distortion of the market: instead of a flat space of equal opportunities, it turns into a distorted funnel of short-term needs, not oriented towards state goals, but, on the contrary, gravitating towards goals that are exactly the opposite - to compress the horizon of choice to a choice between bad and very bad reading matter. The question is to what extent such distortion of the market is acceptable both for its participants and for the state. After all, no one is seriously going to revive the “Soviet” assortment management structures, destroyed at the time of transformation “to the ground” - while “and then” did not come at all.

Undoubtedly, we are talking about losses primarily in popular science literature - in the form of popular science magazines and books. The result of “free” competition was that the domestic popular science genre became an “endangered species.” The recently published book by Andrei Vaganov, dedicated to him, is called: “The Genre That We Lost.” The idea expressed in the book is that while in 1943, to celebrate Newton's 300th birthday, the country could print a total of a million sheets of scientific and popular science literature dedicated to this event, now this is not even close to being expected. This is probably due to the intensity of development of science itself, which in Russia is experiencing deep stagnation on this basis. So far, no well-meaning calls for modernization and ceremonial reports have been able to refute Vaganov’s pessimism. This happens, in my opinion, because popularization is an integral feature of the scientific method itself, which needs new interpretations, therefore science and its popularization constitute a system where the identification of cause-and-effect relationships is, as a rule, impossible. Who is the chicken and who is the egg in the situation with science and popular science literature is an unanswerable question, but neglect of the popular science component is a good indicator of the abnormality of the situation in science itself. Innovative development without science is unrealistic, so all these components are tied into a tight and uncut knot today.

We definitely have something to think about - Russian science today is not competitive internationally in the field of publications, and almost no one is concerned about this. According to the Springer publishing house, expressed as part of the events of the Russian-German Year of Education, Science and Innovation, Russian scientists do not care about how their work looks from the point of view of the world community, and the quality of preparing translations for English-language publications often creates an insurmountable barrier for perception by colleagues abroad. At the same time, the position of the Russian Academy of Sciences in relation to popularization is clearly negative - it is an unnecessary burden. Promotion of the developments of Russian scientists is necessary at all levels - from the level of readability of translations in scientific journals to the interest that can be shown in these developments through publications in the media. However, the trend is strictly the opposite: the developments of Western colleagues are popularized in Russian remakes of Western magazines, which could only be welcomed if there was a counter array of publications from Russia. Our magazine (“Ecology and Life”) has more than once expressed the idea that entering the international publication market must be accompanied by popularization work on the same foreign market, but it went unheard.

In the field of publishing popular science literature, the country has sharply darted from the most prosperous country in this regard, with millions of copies of popular science magazines, to the opposite extreme - to a country with a dominance of bloody horror on bookshelves and television screens. Policy towards science and education often confirms Andrei Vaganov’s hypothesis, reflected in the vanishingly small circulation of the domestic wing of popularization. Publishers prefer to translate something ready-made, and their own scientific traditions are disappearing, although they have very deep roots.

Well, in conditions when no one understands why a modernizing state needs such tools as popular science books and periodicals, and the market itself is rushing headlong towards its transformation into a “non-market”, we must look for some cardinal solutions. Whether it will be a state corporation or a state program is unknown, but thought must work in this direction, otherwise domestic science, no matter who it is associated with - the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences or hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of "proletarians" of mental labor - will not be able to play a significant role. for the country of the role. The social role of science is declining within the country, and no one knows about its authority and success abroad—as a result, external investors are cautious, and internal investors are distrustful. So it turns out that, having lost such a small thing as small popular science publishing houses and mass media, we can lose big Russian science, about which nothing can be written.

Irina Opimakh, leading editor of the GALILEO series of popular science books, KoLibri publishing house

All people in one way or another connected with the publishing business are today talking about a possible merger of two giants of the Russian book market - AST and Eksmo. (A criminal case has been filed against AST under the article “False entrepreneurship.”) Whether this merger will happen or not is not yet clear. Deputy head of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications Vladimir Grigoriev believes that “it would be a mistake to destroy the publishing house, which was the leader not only in the number of illegal schemes, but also in the number of talented writers, editors, and artists” (“Novaya Gazeta”, 06.28.12 ). Perhaps debt restructuring will be organized, the economic structure of the publishing house will be rebuilt, and AST will still survive... We'll see. One way or another, the merger of AST and Eksmo, which publish most of the total volume of Russian book products, will lead to the emergence of a huge publishing monster, which will inevitably lead to a decrease in competition in the market (which is bad), a drop in fees for top authors (there will be no luring away authors) and, most importantly, rising prices for books, decreasing circulation and the number of titles of smart books. These smart books for smart readers will remain only in small publishing houses, and they have very little strength and opportunity...

Asked questions
Sergey Popov