Research Information:FOCUS ON THE MIDDLE EAST Market U


transformations in Israel


Israel has not been immune to the decline in the numbers of books purchased and read, which is evident anywhere throughout the Western world, writes Avi Shilon


p until two years ago, the main publishing houses blamed the book stores and the deals they were offering for the publishers’ shrinking bottom lines. Israelis had gotten used to buying books only when they were offered on sale – four books for 25 dollars.


The deals’ advocates had argued they were necessary in order to encourage book sales in an era in which modern lifestyle is already eating away the time and motivation dedicated to reading. The objectors had claimed that the deals were eroding books’ status as valuable items, and doubted whether consumers were actually reading all of the books they were getting on sale.


Based on the publishing houses’ claims, a new Law for the Protection of Literature and Authors was enacted by the Knesset in July 31 2013. According to the law, a book cannot be offered at a discount during the first 18 months after its publication, except for special occasions. The results of this experiment are not clear yet. On the one hand, the sales volume of new books was reduced by up to 35 per cent, and the overall volume of book sales was cut down by about 15 per cent. On the other hand, authors are indeed making more money and books were reinstated as respectable gifts. The following months will be crucial to the subject since books which were published after the new law had been


28 Research Information FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016


enacted will have the chance to be sold with a discount after 18 months – and we would be able to understand the affect. It is important to notice that non-fiction books maintain higher and even growing sales rate.


One explanation has to do with the fact that those books have a specific niche of target audience, which is willing to invest its time and resources in a book. Another explanation has to do with the reader’s experience when reading a non-fiction book. You may read a specific chapter,


introduction or conclusions – an advantage for people who have a limited reading time at their disposal. Obviously, the fact that some of these book are financed by research funds makes life easier for both publishing houses and authors (as for fiction, many Israeli authors are currently raising financial support through crowd funding website – their own alternative to research funds). But the non-fiction market has also been going through transformations. The most popular sub-genre in Israel, is biographies. Four biographies of Yitzhak Rabin, the murdered prime minister, have been written over the last decade, and the fifth, authored by Itamar Rabinovich, is currently underway.


The founding father of the Israeli political right, Menachem Begin, was the focus of three biographies over the last eight years. Israel’s first prime-minister,


David Ben-Gurion, is also attracting renewed interest, and no fewer than three of his biographies are scheduled to be published over the next few years. Biographies are a fairly new phenomenon in Israel. Anita Shapira, one of the top biographers in Israel, first published a biography of Berl Katznelson, one of the leaders of the Israeli Labor movement, in the early 1980s. She was the pioneer in this genre, when many in the academia still doubted its scientific value. Today, however, a growing number of PhD dissertations are offering biographical narratives. Why were Israeli researchers held back from writing biographies, and how can we explain the sudden transformation in the 21st century? Aviva Halamish, who researched this issue, came up with a number of explanations: prominent among them is the decline of the collective ethos, which characterised Israel in its early days, in favour of the current, more individualistic era we live in.


I would like to suggest another essential reason: the poor status of Israel’s current leaders raises nostalgic feelings toward the State’s founding fathers and a desire to decipher their images. In addition, it seems that the Israeli society has grown past the era of commitment to the Zionist ethos,


‘The non-fiction market has also been going through transformations’


as well as the critical post-Zionist era, and is now ready to thoroughly examine the founding fathers, with their strengths and weaknesses, including some embarrassing private secrets, which are the bread and butter of many biographies.


Thus, for examples, love letters written by Ben-Gurion to his young mistresses, when he was already a father and a husband, were recently exposed. While we may assume that these letters would have been silenced in the past by his followers in order to maintain his dignity, it seems that these days, the affair will only increase the interest in his forthcoming biographies.


Avi Shilon is a historian and journalist, whose articles have been published in all of Israel’s major newspapers: Ma’ariv, Globes, Israel Hayom. He currently writes a weekly column in Ha’aretz


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