Trading house Eksmo began selling the memoirs of Prince Harry Spare (Spare) in the original language in Russian markets. The publishing house’s general manager, Yevgeny Kapyev, told Vedomosti that the trading house plans to import more English-language bestsellers into the country.
Kapiev told the newspaper that Prince Harry’s memoir, with a print run of around 100 books, was purchased from a wholesale distributor in the country where the book was officially published in English. The boss of Eksmo did not specify which country he was talking about.
According to him, such purchases allow the buyer not to enter into a licensing agreement, which, in turn, makes it possible to deliver books to Russia by authors and publications who have decided to leave the Russian market after the start of a full-scale war. in Ukraine. This decision was notably made by Stephen King, JK Rowling, Neil Gaiman, as well as Penguin Random House, which owns the rights to Prince Harry’s memoirs.
Kapiev clarified that sales of books in the original version are only an additional source of income for the Eksmo publishing house: they amount to 10 million rubles a year and do not exceed 0.1% of the income of the editor.
However, under conditions where many bestsellers are not published in the Russian Federation, readers who are fluent in English can increase the demand for books with original text, Kapiev believes.
Prince Harry’s memoir caused a great scandal even before the release, and after the release it immediately became a bestseller. In Russia, the book was published in the form of a summary, that is, a narrative of the main theses without direct quotation. Eksmo chief Yevgeny Kapiev said the publishing group sees the project with the summary as “a startup that will help partially solve the problem of the availability of non-fiction novelties, and as an alternative to a compulsory license “.