The book market is seemingly in full swing: an inexhaustible flow of books is seeing the light of day.
In 2020, which was the year of Corona, 6,486 books were published, of which 1,813 are fictional prose and poetry for adults (excluding autobiographies and biographies, children's books, reference books, religious literature, cookbooks and more).
The number of prose and poetry books published per year has almost doubled over the past decade.
But the number of books published is far greater than the market capacity: books are neither sold nor read.
The average household spends NIS 17.4 a month on books that are not textbooks, as of 2017. This means that a family in Israel buys about 2.5 books a year, including children's books.
Reading data in Israel are also declining sharply.
According to a 2017 survey, most Israelis (51%) do not call for pleasure at all (as opposed to calling for study purposes), or call for pleasure for less than an hour a week.
Since there are no buyers for books, the Israeli book market has long since moved to a model of author fees: a person wishing to publish his book will be asked to pay the cost of publishing the book out of his own pocket, in full or in part.
The rates usually range from NIS 50,000 to NIS 90,000, and even more.
How does the new model change the Israeli book market - the status of the book and the author, the relationship between editors and writers, and the structure of book publishing?
"The source of the statement that there are more writers than readers is in the corporate market, which has made the book a cheap and underrated product anyway."
Book Week in Rabin Square, Photo: Dudu Greenspan
Almost all the literary figures I have talked to, for quotation and not for quotation, have flattened in my ears the immense damage caused by the authors' payments model, partly because it may create a preference for affluent writers over writers who cannot afford their books, and because it may sabotage the reciprocal relationship between Authors to their editors.
And yet, they recognize that in certain expenditures — especially in the larger ones, which have less room for maneuver in current operating costs — the requirement for authors to fund their books has now become a survival necessity.
"The excellent ones also sell a little"
"The situation is very worrying, there is no doubt," says Yuval Shimoni, a writer and veteran editor at Am Oved.
"Sales have been cut by many percentages, fewer households buying books, and those who buy - buying less. An older generation of book lovers is passing from the world, and young people are finding other types of substitutes. To attract buyers, chains sell toys, games, vacuum cleaners, mobile chargers. "Anyone who enters such a store often has a hard time knowing where he is entering."
"Over the last decade, I have seen a drastic drop in the number of readers," says another publisher, who asked not to be identified.
why is it happening?
"When you see a book as a product like any other product - a package of paper, cardboard, a little ink - its value is quite low. If you do not weigh the dimension of the book in the book, you can sell a book like a tomato. In fact, perfume? In simplicity, water with a scent. But perfume makers have managed to brand the product as having far more virtues, so we are willing to pay for it. The book chains have done the opposite of the perfume industry. "It's a product, it's a tomato." "Have you ever brought someone a tomato as a gift?"
He said, "The situation at the moment - and this can be said almost universally about the original literature - is that a book without support does not cover the cost of producing it. For example, if the price of the book is NIS 70, not including VAT, There are 14 shekels left. Assuming that the printing cost is 12-9 shekels, which reduces various operating costs, how much is left for the publisher?
And that does not include editing, glosses, positioning, cover design.
From this it is clear that for any such original book sold, the publisher "subsidizes it".
The problem of capitalism.
Noga Albalach, "The United Kibbutz", Photo: Tal Molcho
"There is a surplus, there is a flood of books," says Noga Elbalach, author, editor and CEO of the United Kibbutz Publishing House.
There is no filtering - in the end everything sees light ".
The United Kibbutz Publishing House does not seek full funding from prose writers, but sometimes requires partial participation.
"We are far from taking 50,000 shekels from a narrator, as with some other expenses. The participation is symbolic in relation to the total, but at least it is a participation that will reduce the pit at the end of the road," says Albalach.
The dark secret of the book market
There are areas where author funding has been common for years: in the fields of study and poetry, which in the past were sold less than others, almost all publishers in Israel require authors to fund the publication of their books.
Publishers justify the practice of self-financing non-fiction books by saying that when the authors are academics (like many of the authors of non-fiction in Israel), the funding is usually not on their shoulders, and they have dedicated budgets for publishing their work. On the whole world of books - also on prose, and even on the new children's books.
Is there a situation where there is a book on the editorial board, facing each other, a book funded by the author and another book, which has been transferred to Ketura, but you know that the author will not be able to finance it?
Albalach: "Filtering in publishing is purely literary. If there is a writer who has not passed the literary bar, we will not accept him even if he is willing to fund. We do try to be profitable, but the starting point is literary. Our editorial staff operates out of a cultural mission."
Inheritance of literary and cultural value.
Yoav Rice, publisher of "Persimmon",
But how do you justify a mission when there are 200 readers?
"Exactly. Who are you commissioning?"
Amit Rotbard, editor, translator and publisher at Babel Publishing, says it is impossible to isolate the phenomenon of taking money from writers from the precarious general state of the market. , They are easy to get used to, and they become part of the system of considerations whether to publish a manuscript or not.
But for me it is impossible to talk about the book market as a whole.
There are basically two markets: the corporate market - and everything else.
The two foundations of the corporate market are the Seforim and Steimatzky junction chains, and the expenses associated with them: the junction is related to Kinneret and Modan, and Steimatzky has the relatively new Blue Light Publishing, and it is associated with additional expenses.
"The corporate market is built on excess production. The assumption in the corporate market is that the more you produce - the more you sell, and the more you produce - the smaller the production costs. But in the end you have to get rid of the 'goods' somehow. The turning point was the '4 in 100' sale. It was an impressive and unprecedented sale, selling a book for 25 shekels, a book that would cost more. It was also a turning point in the status of the book and the author - people stopped buying books and started buying deals.
"If that's not enough," says Rotbard, "in 2008 Junction, followed by Steimatzky in 2010, moved to work with the independent expenses on consignment - meaning they stopped buying the books from us, and became our kind of display warehouse. Receipt is only accepted with The sale of the book, when all the investment in the book falls on the publisher's shoulders. The publishers print a lot of books, because that is what the chains demand of them, and when the sale ends at the end of the month - all unsold copies are returned to warehouses, often in Total Loss mode.
The dark secret of the book market is the millions of books that are shredded here every year unnecessarily. "
There is no gatekeeper.
Oded Carmeli, Photo: Lior Kasson
Albalach adds: "For a book to go on sale online, we need to print thousands of copies of each book, 2,000 or 2,500 copies. In the consignment method only what is sold is paid, so all the risk is on the publishers.
In prose we can print a large quantity, and at the end the book is barely displayed, and then it turns out that we print books for them to lie in stock.
And when our warehouses fill up, we end up having to shred. "
Why not donate them to libraries, for example?
"This is an insane amount, tens of thousands of books a year. If you give them away for free - you can not sell, it will flood the market. Think how sad these ecoprints are."
It's really bulimic conduct, swallowing and vomiting.
"Yes. I think the main problem is capitalism, the desire to earn more and more, not just to make a living, but to get rich."
A random collection of books
Writer and editor Oded Carmeli, of Haba Publishing, sees the transition to a model of author payments as part of the transition from a system controlled by gatekeepers - critics, editors, who determine what is valuable and what is not - to a capitalist system controlled by economic interests.
"Many times people are told big dreams, 'Publish a book and we will distribute you, be in Steimatzky, be a bestseller' - that's a lie. They take advantage of people who want to unload what is on their hearts, want to tell their story. They do not necessarily want to be writers. The gatekeepers, the crooks came in. I think it does no good to anyone, neither the writers nor the readers.
"The problem is that they have eliminated the autonomy of the literary republic. They always say 'enough of the gatekeepers, who are usually all kinds of grumpy white men, whoever needs them, let's democratize'. But in the end, democratization is capitalism. "From you go in, you're just paying money. It's not that we have a particularly thriving and flourishing literary scene. People don't read more books, just print more books. It might have been better if there were some gatekeepers, some of whom you might like and others not."
"It's not right to take money from narrators."
Amit Rotbard, publisher of "Babel", Photo: Sharon Rotbard
There was a lot of distortion in the gatekeepers' method. A lot of great writers were rejected.
"I do not claim that the old regime was flawless. But the result is that today 8,000 books are published in Israel, and people read fewer books."
How is the lack of gatekeepers related to a decrease in reading volume?
"Once there are no gatekeepers - you do not know what to read, and you stop following. In the 1970s, people felt they were not cultured if they did not follow new trends in 'our young literature'. Today you can feel completely cultured without following. Nothing - not in literature, not in music, not in architecture. Why? Because no one marks these trends. It gets terribly uninteresting, only lights remain in the dark. If you know the author you might buy the book, and maybe even read it, but no You have no sequence, no map, so it's not interesting anymore.
"Expenditures cry how no one buys and no one reads. But the reason is that their catalog looks like a random collection of books. If they had a clear systemic line, and if people understood what their systemic line was, they could know if it interested them or No. I think it's an unwise move on the part of the publishers to get money from the writers and take out books from the threshing floor and the winery. Editors today say, 'I choose what speaks to me' You have a vision. You need to encourage people to write, not wait for them to contact you. You need to define in advance what your line is.
"Another problem is that the publisher himself, once paid for publishing the book - has no interest in trying to sell.
He will print as few copies as possible, in the worst quality possible, because his money is already guaranteed.
Lots of books today are published with a minimum circulation of 100 copies, more or less (referring to books that are not intended to be distributed in networks; KD). Some are also not sent for review. These are books that do not really have a literary existence.
Calls for the Return of the Book Law.
Visitor at a literature fair, Photo: Yoav Ari Dodkevitz
"The publisher says to himself, 'I have no choice, I'll take this poor man's money.'
But that's how they just dig the pit for themselves.
Salaries in expenses go down because they do not sell books, but why do they not sell books?
Because they put out too many books.
And why are they putting out too many books?
Because there is no systemic line.
It's an egg and a chicken.
The money should come from the readers, not the writers.
It's like starting to charge musicians to organize a show.
But it would be nice if there was an audience in the show as well, wouldn't it?
"We live in a cacophony. It serves some capitalists who make money at our expense, and in a cacophony no voice is heard. The editor's job is to say, as Nathan Zach wrote, one moment please, there is a new, original and unique voice here."
So the solution to the problems is to bring back the gatekeepers?
"Or eliminate capitalism."
Budget, budget, budget
When I asked what could be done to rectify the situation, almost all the literary figures I interviewed said that the key to change was market regulation.
Most of them also think that the Book Law should be repealed, which set a fixed price for a book in the first year and a half to be published, and obliges the chains to maintain a proportional display of the books on the main tables in the networks.
"I think the main problem today is the cheapness of the book," says Yoav Rice, publisher of Persimmon Publishing.
After all, when you want something, you buy it, even if it costs a little more. "
Along with the calls for tighter regulation and the return of the Book Law, there have also been proposals to strengthen reading: for example, to encourage and support "reading clubs";
To support independent shops and recognize them as in cultural institutions (since in any case, literary events are held there on a regular basis);
Invest in encouraging reading through a system of mentorship, similar to the "America reads" program led by Bill Clinton at the time;
Or broadly support public libraries and turn them into community centers (as done in the US, and data show that in 2016 more than 171 million Americans visited public libraries - more than half the population!) And together they visited public libraries more than 1.35 billion times that year ).
Albalach also proposes to increase government support for book publishing.
"Art always has to focus on subsistence, and in the current map the focus should be on the state. Cinema is a good example - it is an area that receives large budgets from the state, and it is flourishing. "It needs to be rethought, both in terms of the categories and in terms of the amount of the budget. On the order of 7,000 shekels, that's nice - but not enough."
If they increase their budgets, you will be spending more books and more profit. But that does not change the fact that there are no readers.
"If the state could darken the screens for two hours a day, I'm sure people would read more, talk more and have more sex ... but since that would not happen, budgets should be allocated to encourage this neglected activity. For example, in France, when a high school student, he "Get 300 euros for cultural consumption. It can be plays, literature, whatever they choose. To me, encouraging reading is really a national task."
"An older generation of book lovers is passing from the world."
Yuval Shimoni, author and veteran editor of "Am Oved",
Why do you actually need expenses?
A question that arose in conversations with the literary figures, is what will happen to the expenses, especially the medium-sized ones, which have a team of administrative people, sales, designers, warehouses, etc.
The experience of recent years, and especially in the Corona period, has taught that there is a significant advantage to the small expenses, with the small and flexible mechanism, in which usually one person fills all the roles.
Some publishers have said that the author fee model may encourage writers to look for ways to get around the expenses, and print the books on their own, at much smaller costs - after all, physical production of a book is not a problem. For selected books, while the rest of the production processes - proofreading, printing, PR, etc. - will be covered by the authors at cost prices.
Thus the expenses will continue to maintain a symbolic value (the seal of quality of the editors' choice), and the editors will receive a fair wage for their work, a wage that many times they fail to receive in expenses today.
This question is sharpened after the experience of the Corona period, in which the small expenditures survived much better than the large ones.
Rothbard of Babylon, as the publisher of Small Publishing, says she does not feel a drop in the number of readers. To Khalat, and at once complete systems in the book market have returned from work.
New opportunities have been created for small expenditures, which have shown flexibility and adaptability.
"Out of this forced crisis, there are expenditures that have set up physical bookstores for themselves. We held an alternative book week, which was a great success. Expenses that had online stores - grew. The readers are healthy, only the market is sick. .
Steimatzky and Book Junction chose not to comment on the article.
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