Feature Market Focus
Standing firm
With the blights caused by occupation almost 30 years in its past, the Lithuanian book market has put currency troubles and censorship worries well behind it—and is enjoying a renaissance. Katherine Cowdrey reports
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HE LITHUANIAN BOOK trade isn’t large, with only 63 publishers in the country that have an annual output of more than 10 books. However, despite the challenges of a small market—exacerbated by a tumultuous decade since the global economic crisis— there is optimism that publishers have found their place in the market economy and that the sector is starting to grow again, with home-grown authors poised to become the nation’s calling card.
The book trade in Lithuania has had a rocky ride. During the Soviet era censorship was rife, and there were only a handful of state-owned publishers. The country declaring independence in 1990 caused a boom in the sector, with a flurry of new publishers launch- ing between 1990 and 1992. Fluctuations caused by the implementation of a new currency in 1993 and the Russian financial crisis of 1998 triggered a decline, but by the early 2000s the nation’s publishing industry was in recovery, and early in the century spending on books and periodicals rose for a number of years by a healthy double-digit percentage. Then the global financial crisis
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hit, consumer purchasing power contracted, not helped by an increase in VAT and a subsequent rise in the price of books. Between 2008 and 2010, the number of new titles published in Lithuania dropped by 30% (from 4,600 to 3,200 titles) and annual volume sales fell from 7.3 million to 5 million units.
Lithuanian Publishers Association executive director Aida V Dobkevičiūtė says the market has “stabilised” and is even “starting to grow” again. The number of publishers has been increasing since 2011, along with expenditure on books, and every year the Vilnius Book Fair—the country’s showpiece literary event—atracts more and more visitors. More than 500 publishers (63 of which are those “active publishers” whose annual output is in double digits) published just over 3,300 titles collectively in 2016, reaching a combined circula- tion in excess of 4.6 million copies (up from 4.3 million in 2015). Dobkevičiūtė acknowledges that state-supported libraries are publishers’ biggest customers, but along- side bricks-and-mortar bookselling, new book-buying
Top Lithuanian citizens join hands in a peaceful demonstration to form The Baltic Way on 23rd August 1989, a human chain spanning the three Baltic states, 675km and 2 million people in protest at Soviet rule. Above Aida V Dobkevičiūtė of the country’s publishers association
12th April 2018
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