Books

Critic Galina Yuzefovich writes:

“I read the nervous post from Zakhar Prilepin (not the first, by the way), in which he complains that the excellent anthology of the poems about the Donbass, released by Margarita Simonyan, will not be ordered by book trade networks, will not appear on a premium calculation in stores and will not reach the reader at all. The reason for this, of course, according to Prilepin, is the creep of the liberalism of booksellers and book publishers. < ... >

Conclusion - the mobilization of the book -trade is necessary and (well, I am already completing this) the forced distribution of ideologically significant books. As they say, Goyda. < ... >

With all the shortcomings of the Russian book market, he is still a market, which means that the very invisible hand of demand and sentences is controlled, which Adam Smith told us so incendiary. The sale of a book of poems about the Donbass is a thousand, well, maybe two thousand copies, and not fast - say, in a couple of years, and throughout the country in a flat layer (add the cost of logistics). In another situation, it would be, in principle, what to talk about, but in conditions when printing on the verge of survival, the reader scatters around the republics of Central Asia, and the paper stands like a wing from an airplane, publishers and booksakers will not have too much enthusiasm “let's make something beautiful and patriotic-nothing that will not pay off, but the conscience of the puree before the stepfather”. The loot, as you know, wins evil - or rather, in this case its absence.

In other words, “mobilize” the book industry can only be a power method - turning it, in fact, into a state monopoly and pouring state money into it (more precisely, taking the state -containment). That is, killing a book business as a business. Given how small we have a book market and how negligible its influence on public opinion is, of course, no one will do this - the state has other concerns. And by itself, no one is “mobilizing” - not only does not want to, but can not. There is no resource. "