The Ukrainian Publishing Association has appealed to President Volodymyr Zelensky to convene a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) and consider the state and restoration of the publishing industry.
This was written on Facebook by Artem Bidenko, the head of the Ukrainian Publishing Association.
Bidenko stressed that due to systematic Russian attacks on printing houses, warehouses and bookstores, the book publishing sector is on the verge of survival. In the address, the authors noted that over the summer the book industry lost approximately 13 million books — a third of the entire annual circulation in Ukraine. The direct losses of the industry are estimated at at least UAH 1.19 billion.
Book publishers are asking to oblige the Cabinet of Ministers to take "urgent measures". Among the key demands are to allocate funds to compensate for losses and restore destroyed book circulations, primarily textbooks, as well as to extend the mechanism of war risk insurance to goods in circulation.
Publishers also propose to restore direct state purchases of books in order to renew library funds, extend affordable lending programs to publishing houses and printing houses, and create a single interdepartmental working group on book market development.
Publishers warn of the risk of Ukrainian books being displaced by foreign commercial products in the event of the industryʼs decline.
- Recently, the Russians have often attacked book warehouses. In particular, on August 5, during a massive night attack, more than 100 000 books from the “BookChef” publishing house were destroyed. On August 1, Russia struck the warehouse of the “Ranok” publishing house in Kharkiv. At that time, the attack destroyed at least 8 million Ukrainian books.
- Culture Minister Tetyana Berezhna reported that in July, Russian attacks destroyed more than 1.5 million books and textbooks from Ukrainian publishers.
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