Why is Prince Harry’s book story published in Russia?

The Russian publishing house “Eksmo-AST” will publish a summary of Prince Harry’s book “Spare” (“Spare”). This will be a brief account of the book without direct quotes. The choice is not fortuitous: just on the first day of sales, January 10, 1.4 million copies were sold in the USA, Great Britain and Canada. And worldwide in the first week, 3.2 million copies were sold. The memoirs have been translated into 26 languages ​​- Russian is not one of them.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine , many publishing houses deny Russian publishers the right to translate into Russian and publish their books. Among them is the world’s largest publishing house Penguin Random House, which released “Spare”. Thus, the release date of the full text of “Reserve” in Russia is unknown. Another thing is sketchy. To publish an abstract, the permission of the copyright holder is not required. At the same time, this idea came to several publishers at once. There are already two alternative summaries available on the Liters e-book service – from the Smart Reading e-library and from a team of anonymous authors, both in text and audio form. Eksmo-AST announced the release of its electronic versions of Zapasnoy on February 16, but for now they are not even available on the publisher’s site.
This is far from the first experience of publishing abstracts in Russia. Similar publications have already been published, explains Vladimir Kharitonov, director of the Association of Internet Publishers: “From a purely historical point of view, the summary is a history of very old publishing, dating almost from the 18th and 19th centuries. . Not only in publishing Russian books, but also in Europe. A large number of thick stories, for example, oriental books, such as “A Thousand and One Nights” have been published. There was nothing special about it.”
Smart Reading, whose version of Zapasnoy’s summary is already available on Liters’ site, specializes in editing short non-fiction stories. He has published summaries of Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Harari, biographies of Steve Jobs, Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, and reviews of over 800 other books. In other countries, there are also publishers and services that publish abstracts: StoryShots, 12min, Blinkist, getAbstract and others. Mikhail Ivanov, the founder of Smart Reading, responding to a post from literary journalist Konstantin Milchin on Facebook, wrote the following: “We have been making summaries of non-fiction books at Smart Reading for 9 years. (…) The summary is a quick way to extract key ideas from books, removing all the water. Most non-fiction books adapt very well to the summary format.
Although publishing stories is not a new practice in Russia, many publishers are skeptical about it, says Vladimir Kharitonov: “It’s not very good with publishers. I remember well the 90s, when entire collections were published: “All classical literature in narrative”, there was such a thick book. They are still niche products. Including because some publishers are not very comfortable with others. Publishers have a bad attitude about publishing summaries of their books. They worked, worked, invested money in there, and then someone comes and, relatively speaking, tells on ten pages what they worked there. And he gets paid for it too. This, of course, is not well received. When the Smart Reading service, created by one of the founders of the publishing house Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, was launched in 2014, almost all publishers said: “Well, no, it’s not good at all, it’s copyright infringement.” Although there is no copyright infringement, if you do everything skillfully, no.
In Russia, as in many other countries, works are indeed not protected against rebroadcasting, confirms Andrey Richter, copyright specialist, professor at Comenius University in Bratislava: what he discovered. Everywhere, including in Russia, copyright does not protect the content, but the form. That is, the form of the book, the language, the elocution techniques, the plot, the order, the titles – all of this is protected. And the content: certain descriptions, actions, etc. – it’s not protected. Only the description of this content is protected. And in this case, we can say that it is a new form. Yes, with similar content. It all depends on how it will be served. If they give the name of the author and the title of the book, there are big problems. If the title of the book is “Story of the book such and such”, there will be fewer problems. If there’s no author at all, simply “telling Prince Harry’s book about so-and-so” is even less of an issue.
The industry believes that summaries of Western bestsellers can be an alternative to compulsory licensing. Yevgeny Kapiev, the general manager of Eksmo-AST, spoke about the same thing in an interview with Kommersant. The draft law on compulsory licensing was submitted to the State Duma in August 2022. It concerned books, films or computer games that have become completely unavailable on the Russian market and belong to copyright holders of “hostile countries”. The authors of the project suggested forcibly licensing these works regardless of their copyright holders. However, in December the bill was defeated before reaching the readings.
The print version of Zapasnoy’s summary of Eksmo-AST will go on sale at the end of February, representatives of the publishing group said in an interview with Kommersant. The first print run will be 3,000 copies.According to Vladimir Kharitonov, the news of the summary, which caused so many emotions among the public, is just a successful press stunt from the publisher: “[Эксмо-]AST can be congratulated: they just jumped on the hype, rode this wave, also because Prince Harry’s memoir is a million-copy bestseller, everyone is talking about it. They write how bad a book it is, they write how good a book it is – but there is no book. It is clear that for the Russian reader there is no other way to know it, except by telling it, no. Well, or wait a bit, when the war is over, the disaster will stop being a disaster and life will somehow improve. But when it will be, nobody knows, and I think that at that point this book will no longer be very relevant.