What is big and what is small in publishing? Should the size of the book markets be measured by their turnover, the number of published titles, the number of copies sold, or else? And what social and cultural factors frame the size of book markets? The number of native speakers? Their education, incomes, and cultural traditions? How important is the spread of language they read in, regardless of state borders? And what happens when we ponder data about book markets by the million or thousand inhabitants?

Statistical issues and performance indicators in book publishing industries are regularly analyzed in scholarly press (see, for example, Bhaskar and Phillips, 2019, and Kovac et al. 2018 and 2019) and in professional publication, made publicly available on their websites by the Federation of European Publishers (https://fep-fee.eu/), International Publishers Association https://www.internationalpublishers.org/), and Association of American Publishers (https://publishers.org/). In addition, differences between smaller and bigger book markets were occasionally analyzed in publications such as Global Ebook Reports (2012–2019). Up until the arrival of self-publishing and the growth of e-book retailers, the prevailing vertical integration of publishing and book selling was seen as one of the main peculiarities of so-called small book markets.

Yet, the question what makes a book market big or small has never been fully answered. Obviously, such comparisons make sense only among similarly developed countries: even if they were similar in overall number of titles published, benchmarking Icelandic and Afghan book markets, for example, would make no sense due to the demographic, cultural, historic, and political differences between the two countries.

For the purposes of this issue, we therefore decided to focus on similarly developed small book markets as they exist in the European Union. We arbitrarily decided that by the rule of thumb, we’ll draw a line between small and big book markets at around 10 million inhabitants. With this, the issues of GDP and language became more obvious: Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia, for example, have similar populations, similar GDPs per capita, and their languages are predominantly spoken on their respective territories – all of which makes sense in drawing comparisons among their book industries. The large and similarly developed Croatia, however, has an export market in neighboring Bosnia or even in Serbia. On the other hand, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Austria, and Scotland fit the population criteria of a small market, yet their GDPs almost double the GDPs of small countries in Central and Eastern Europe; even more so, languages spoken in Scotland and Austria are shared with much bigger populations in the UK and USA, and Germany and Switzerland, respectively. And last but not least, countries such as Georgia fit our population criteria, while their GDP is about half below the GDPs in Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, again by the rule of thumb, when editing contributions to this issue of Knygotyra, we considered relevant only those papers that benchmarked book markets in similarly populated and economically developed countries. That was one of the main criteria for accepting the papers for this special issue.

But finally, why at all should we be looking at small book markets as a separate entity? At least two answers come to mind.

First, there are economic reasons. In the last two decades, book markets became bestseller-driven (for more about this, see, for example, Kovač and Wischenbart, 2019): if a bestseller in Germany sells half a million copies, its Latvian equivalent sells five thousand copies, what makes the capital accumulation of its publisher hundred times smaller than of their German colleague. Further, it is an old publishing wisdom that in general, the higher the average number of sold copies of a given book title, the lower the per unit costs: therefore, the smaller the book market, the lower the average net incomes of publishers. On the other side, the development of digital publishing infrastructure and of corresponding business models requires significant capital investments: putting all this together, it becomes obvious why reasons for the slow pace of technological development of small European book industries are predominantly structural. The first and second wave of Covid-19 pandemics in spring and autumn 2020 made these traits of small book markets even more visible.

Second, similar as is the case with their bigger counterparts, culture (often – but not always – together with language) and history are the main determinants of small nations’ identities. In shaping it, books and print played important role. This role was even more striking when book culture changed into one of the pillars of ethnical and national identity, which was often the case when such small countries lost – or never had – their nation states.

When starting to work on this special issue, we assumed that this rather bizarre mix of economic pressures culled with cultural and historic traditions created a specific set of publishing traditions and business practices that differ from the ones in bigger, more lucrative and correspondingly more developed book markets. This special issue is our first attempt to test such beliefs in a more structured and scholarly way.

We divided the papers into three main sections and added one additional section with papers not related to our topic (small languages) or period of interest (21st century).

The section on publishing in Small Nations Next to Large Language Countries starts with Anna Klamet, who investigated the impact of digitization on small publishing houses in Austria and Scotland through qualitative case study research. Her piece is one of the first scholarly attempts to explore how lowered market entry barriers and increased international competition caused by digitization have changed the modus operandi of local publishers in small book markets that share the language with bigger markets. Filip Horvat and Zoran Velagić analyze Croatian academic publishing in the European context, and suggest that neither local, private publishing companies, nor public research institutions understand electronic publishing as a either lucrative business model or an opportunity to increase the visibility of scholarly research in Croatia. Miha Kovač and Arūnas Gudinavičius provide an interim report on how publishers in Slovakia, Iceland, Lithuania, and Slovenia reacted to the COVID-19 crisis in the first half of 2020 and show how the COVID-19 lockdown resulted in decreased sales of printed books in all four book markets. As they show, sales of e-books and audiobooks increased during that period, but did not contribute significantly to the overall results of those book industries due to its small market share in all four countries.

The section on translation starts with Ana Kvirikashvili’s paper, who analyzes the impact of the “Georgian Literature in Translation” program on the Georgian literary field as a part of preparations of Georgia for being the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Andrej Blatnik provides an overview of literary translation support mechanisms in the world and compares them with the ones existing in Slovenia. His paper reveals that Slovenians are almost four times more likely to read translated than domestic novels and warns that the number of inappropriately translated and edited books is on the rise.

Different elements of the book communication circuit are covered in the section From Editing to Distributing. Jurgita Girčienė investigates role of the editor in the contemporary book publishing processes and founds out that in the Lithuanian book industry, the positions of content editors are not as crystallized as they are in bigger and more developed markets. Laura Kepalienė analyzes how green open access is being developed in Lithuanian scholarly publishing and looks at the reasons why the attempts to collect full-text Lithuanian scholarly publications into a national repository failed. Arūnas Gudinavičius analyzes the recent developments in Lithuanian book selling and concludes that in the last five years, the number of brick and mortar bookstores decreased, whilst the remaining ones reduced the choice of book titles on behalf of merchandise.

These three sections round up the texts that analyze small book markets in Europe. In accordance with Knygotyra tradition, we added an additional section Lessons We Can Learn from Recent History, which deal with issues related to the main topic from historical perspective.

The section begins with book history issues. Oksana Petrenko analyzes the first attempt to provide a bibliographic and statistical account of the books that were published in Ukraine in the 19th century and looks at how children’s book publishing statistics were institutionalized in Ukraine. Arida Riaubienė investigates censorship of books imported to Lithuania between 1918 and 1940. She shows that officials in charge of censorship paid special attention to content they considered non-moral and to publications of various religious sects. The last paper is dedicated to archive researchers – Reda Griškaitė proposes a fresh look at the collections once stored in a specific 19th century manor, classed among the category of the so-called intellectual manors – the Teodor Narbutt’s (or Teodor Mateusz Ostyk-Narbutt, 1784–1864) Šiauriai manor. Teodor Narbutt’s collections have been collected purposefully as material necessary for the writing of history of Lithuania.

This special issue of Knygotyra is the result of long-lasting collaboration between researchers of several small language countries. We hope this issue will contribute to a better understanding of the peculiarities of publishing in such markets.

References

1. Bhaskar, Michael and PHILLIPS, Angus (ed.). The Oxford handbook of publishing. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 207–225.

Global Ebook Reports. Available at https://www.wischenbart.com/page-61

3. KOVAČ, Miha; WISCHENBART, Rüdiger. Globalization and publishing. The Oxford handbook of publishing. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 207–225.

4. KOVAČ, Miha; PHILLIPS, Angus; WEEL, Adriaan van der; WISCHENBART, Rüdiger. What is a book?. Publishing research quarterly, 2019, vol. 35, no. 3, p. 313–326. doi: 10.1007/s12109-019-09665-5.

5. KOVAČ, Miha; PHILLIPS, Angus; WEEL, Adriaan van der; WISCHENBART, Rüdiger. Book statistics: what are they good for? Logos, 2017, vol. 28, iss. 4, p. 7–17.

Notes