The article says that readers refuse to read Russian-language books, but haven't those books (including those written by Ukrainian authors) been banned after the war started?

As far as I know, since summer there is a ban on importing books from Russia and Belarus. Books written by Ukrainian authors in Russian language and published in Ukraine until 1st of January 2023 aren't banned.

Not in the slightest. At most there was a general effort to standardize official government documents on Ukrainian following the events of 2014, but everything remains available by request in Russian.

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The money is meant to fund the defense against Russia not to get books published. And it's not money being spent inside the Ukrainian economy, at least not most of it. A lot of it isn't money being given to them but weapons being sent. The figures are based on the amount of money being allocated by the state to use to buy weapons to send them. So unless they sell the weapons that money isn't going to trickle anywhere.

Seems like it's indeed tougher situation for non-EU languages, in general. Publishing in EU languages has no limits. In non-EU, it's only for the books for which the non-EU language is the language of the original. Basically, getting "Art of War" in English is fine. In Chinese - fine. In Vietnamese or Russian - not really. For these cases a case-per-case basis is implemented. On top of that is a ban of books written by Russian Federation citizens.

Yet, you can still publish "Anna Karenina" in Russian language in Ukraine, for example, for it was written prior to 1991, and it's a language of the original.

https://news-obozrevatel-com.translate.goog/ukr/economics/economy/v-ukraini-zaboronili-rosijski-knigi-rishennya-verhovnoi-radi.htm?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=uk&_x_tr_pto=wapp

More interested in how the Russian publishers could survive sanctions, a bad economy, a war, and putin.

Russian publishers have a sizeable internal market - about 150 million people, give or take. And sanctions did not affect the Russian economy much - IMF projects a mere 3.4% drop in GDP for 2022 and further 2.3% in 2023 (numbers per the October 2022 release).

>Russian publishers have a sizeable internal market - about 150 million people, give or take.

I don't know what the trends are in Russia but thats like saying every American is a potential reader. I bet most are not reading, reading is a luxury.

Russia does have writers like Dostoevsky, so people will want to read them, especially now that the whole country is in turmoil. I'm sure there were novelists who lived through the turbulent 1940s as well, when Hitler's army was destroying the Red Army in battle after battle. Russians will look back at their past for inspiration.

This is bullshit and Ukrainian propaganda. Don't fall for it.

9 posts and 1036 points. We've got a bot army on Reddit.

What exactly is the propaganda propagated here? Do point out the bullshit.

Russia is quite a well-read nation, to be honest. 29% of Russians read books every day, 30% read at least once a week, and a further 16% read books every month. Which leaves only 25% of the non-reading population.

It's more or less on par with the USA statistics (30, 25 and 16% correspondingly).

Sauce (data is from 2017)

EDIT: the sauce seems to be paywalled, however, there is a workaround: search for "world reading habits 2017" in the private browser window. Link to Statista should be among the top results and they allow you to view the data once if coming from a Google search.

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do you have a non-paywalled source, or at least a source where the actual graph, abstract or sources can be viewed without paying 50 euro? That data seems bizarre to me and I would be interested in how they reached it.

How do you figure. For funsies I skimmed through a few pages of their post history and they seem neither like a Putin glorifier nor like a bot.

Damn. It's the second time it happens to me.

When I accessed this source via Google search, it didn't paywall the data. Opening it from the Reddit link doesn't let me see shit. :(

Try searching for "world reading habits 2017" from the private window. It seems to allow you to open the stats one time for free.

However looking at the sidebar, the source seems to be an online survey, so results are probably skewed somewhat (though given that over 90% of Russians have Internet access, probably not much - at least the distortion should be relatively similar to that of USA results).

It also does match pretty well with my own observations, though obviously, my account is purely anecdotal and not statistically significant :)

Because I do not equate every single Russian to an uncivilized orc, perhaps? :)

Go further.

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I'm willing to change my mind but I'm not really invested enough to spend more than two minutes scouring someone's post history.

At the very least I don't see how someone who's had conversations about a bunch of different topics in the past weeks could be a bot.

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Mine is about Russian publishers I doubt it. When Reddit sees “Ukraine” it’s getting upvotes.

Why is the 25% not reading? Are they less literate or just online instead? I don’t read much, and the stats say Korea and Japan read the least but they’re not stupid nations so there’s a lot of noise.

It’s a survey. Japan and S Korea don’t read much either compared to the world so either manga doesn’t count, or Japan and S Korea; the home of manga and mangwa doesn’t actually read their own media, or the data is trash.

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I also saw that and it seemed weird to me, I wanted to see how the author might have controlled for other media but it seems there were no controls or methodology beyond asking the question if they "read books" on an online survey which seems like a horrible way to gather any kind of reliable data - especially if the survey was in English. I can only assume though which is why I ask for a methodology that isn't paywalled since I'm not forking over 50 euros.

It be much harder to assume anything else. Maybe author chased down millions of people and spied on their reading habits daily and won’t give December 25th presents if they didn’t read, but sent the survey out in elsewhere in Russian and the people of the democratic republic of Congo didnt have google translate.

It was probably for people with internet access in their native language. And the people of Japan and Korea probably read online or don’t count their “comics”.

That's quite the uncivilised thing to say. Are you always like this?

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