The Publishing Horizon

Comparison of estimates of the size of the Indian Book Publishing Industry

At the outset, it should be borne in mind that the cardinal word when referring to size of the Indian book publishing industry, whether in this post or anywhere else for that matter is "estimates" - unfortunately, there are no proper studies of the Indian book publishing industry so far.

The Strategist (October 21, 2008) provides estimates of the size of the Indian publishing industry, based on data provided by Technopak Advisors.

THE INDIAN publishing market is estimated at Rs 20,000 crore (~ US$ 4.5 Billion)

IT CONSISTS OF books, magazines and newspapers.

THE BOOKS MARKET IS estimated to be Rs 13,000 crore (~ US$ 2.9 Billion) , which is segmented into education and non-education books market.

THE MAGAZINES market is estimated to be 15 per cent of the total market, which is Rs. 3,000 Crore (~ US$670 Million).

THE NEWSPAPERS market is estimated at Rs 4,000 crore (~ US$ 890 Million)

Technopak Advisors haven't mentioned the basis for their estimates, but the above estimates from Technopak Advisors for the Indian book market are a good 30% higher than the estimates provided in the The India Publishing Market Profile 2008 (also only rough estimates based on hearsay and not any study) which had suggested that

The total book market was worth around Rs. 10,000 Crore, of which

The school book market may be worth around Rs. 3,500 Crore

The higher education book and journal market may be worth around Rs. 2,500 Crore

The trade book market may be worth Rs. 4,000 Crore, of which the English language segment may be worth about Rs. 2,400 Crore

The figures from Technopak Advisors for newspaper and magazine revenues in India are much much lower than other estimates for the same.

According to the 2008 PriceWaterhouseCoopers report    

Print Media (Newspapers and Magazines)
Current size in 2007 – Rs 149 billion (Rs. 14,900 Crore) ; Rs 128 billion (Rs. 12,800 Crore) in 2006
Projected size in 2012 – Rs 281 billion (Rs. 28,100 Crore) projected for 2012
Growth in 2007 over 2006 – 16%; 14% CAGR for 2008-12

According to a recent article in Knowledge@Wharton

Magazine advertising revenues are Rs. 1,400 crore, while circulation revenues are Rs. 500 crore.

For newspapers, the corresponding figures are Rs. 8,000 crore and Rs. 5,000 crore.

PwC projects growth in magazine advertising revenues over the next five years at 16%, compared with 10% growth for circulation revenues. For newspapers, the numbers are further skewed, at 16% and 8%, respectively.

David Davidar's insights on book publishing, in Canada, in India and their implications

from an interview with Sharif Khan.

Book publishing

But think of the odds...There are about 100,000 books published every year. How on earth are you going to get each of those books to a reader's attention!

Let's say you walk into a bookstore, you face the first novel that appears and you have no idea what it's about. There is so much competing for your attention. Most novels sell only about 400 or 500 copies. If it's a good seller it will sell 5000 copies if it won an award and got great reviews.

It is only superstars that sell more and superstars are very few and every one knows who they are. The question we need to ask is why are there so few superstars? Why isn't every writer published famous? There isn't enough attention available for these writers. So that TV time, radio time, bookstore sales, all mitigate against every writer getting in.

Two or three industries suffer from the same thing, movie and TV, and music being closest to the book industry. Think of the tens of thousands of artists who've produced CDs and nobody's heard of them, and nobody will hear of them because that is the way the system works.

....

Finding a good agent is becoming increasingly tough because they too are inundated with manuscripts as well. The agent comes to us generating interest in a book and we have special editors, one specializes in Canadian writers; she says okay or no, I like it or don't like it. The book is brought to a meeting where she says she wants to pay this kind of money. You have a price on this book say $35 dollars, so the author will get a percentage royalty on every book sold. For a 10% royalty you will get $3.5 dollars on every copy sold.

So what we will do, is advance the author, through his or her agent x amount of money, say $35,000 dollars because we expect to sell 5,000 or 6,000 hardback and 10,000 copies in paperback, so we figure its worth about $35,000. So it's not an outright gift...it's an advance against royalties.

Then hopefully the book is published and lives up to expectations and earns out and the response is we're happy, the author is happy, and the agent is happy...but in 90% of the cases it doesn't earn out the advance and so you're in trouble. Of the 100 books published in Canada, I expect 20 books to support the rest.

in Canada

Canada has certain problems and certain advantages like many markets in the world. I'll deal with the problem first. It's a small market. It's 35 million of which 5 million are French speakers, so you can't do much with that size of market. Whereas America is 200 million plus, UK is over 60 million, Australia is really small, about 20 million. So tens of thousands of books are jostling for attention in this country.

Plus you have the major superstore Indigo Chapters which controls over 50% of market, so if they don't support a book it's dead in the water. And there is immense pressure on them as well because there are so many books pouring in. So these are the problems people have to deal with including the fact that there are lots of writers, agents, lots of publishing houses, everyone competing for that elusive customer.

On the positive side, because of the way Canada has been encouraging immigration for the last 30 years, you have the whole world sitting here, and so Canada's stories are quite fresh; whereas writing about one's experiences living in Mississauga that's where a lot of these books get bogged down because if your domestic experience is not interesting, how will you make your book interesting?

Your life is interesting to friends, family, and about a 100 people who know you. That is where most first novels fail because they are so autobiographical, instead of trying to sell a story. Why would people want to read a book unless they're interested in your life?

The interesting thing here is you have people from Somalia, Kosovo, Taiwan, India, and they're all writing books about their own experiences and that's what makes it interesting. So I think Canada has a great future about the stories its writers are starting to tell. And it is a very good domestic market for its size because per capita people read a lot more here than other countries.

I was once asked at the Canada Book Expo, where I was giving a presentation, what advice can I give aspiring writers. My reply is they should always take risks. There's no point in writing a small, safe, book...it just disappears. Take risk! What do you have to lose? Stretch yourself, write a big, huge, ambitious book! And those are the books that always leave a mark because there's so few around.

in India

The Indian publishing scene in 20 years will be the second or third largest in the world overtaking Canada and Australia; I'm talking about English language publishing. I've heard there are about 300 million Indians using some form of English, so they've already taken over the US and UK, but for the publishing industry you need to use English as first language or frequently because otherwise you're not going to go to the bookstore to buy a book. You might go to a street fair, but you're not my market. That's going to take a while.

I think today there are 7 to 8 million Indians who use English effortlessly, so that's about the size of New Zealand, but because you have next generation teenagers and young people learning English at the speed of light, they are going to join the market in another 5 to 10 years; this generation will continue to be the market, and there's going to be bit of the previous generation also in the market, so from about 7 to 8 million India will go to 30 to 40 million in the space of 15 to 20 years which means it's just going to explode. It's already the fastest growing market in the world and it's a huge market.

Penguin India is fortunate, we came in the beginning so we got in on the ground floor; all we need is to reap the benefits of our earlier labor because this market is growing, while the Canadian market is pretty much static. However, it is growing through some immigration. That is why Canada needs to look out for itself constantly and build its strengths to the world if it's going to keep its economy and lifestyle going.

Davidar's observations are pregnant with implications for book publishing in India.

• Unlike Canada, or the other major book publishing markets of USA, UK, Europe and Australia, there are no dominant superstore or even small bookstore chains in India controlling over 10% of the book retail yet. In fact, the penetration by the organised retail sector in India in the Books & Music segment is just about 10% (Ernst & Young India retail report), which is itself fragmented across the few chains that are there today. Publishers ought to think about the extent to which the chains can help in reaching the readers, and the extent to which they can/should invest in supporting the growth of the independent/unorganised book retailers. 
  
• The potential audience for English publishing in India may be about 30-40 million in 15-20 years, but the potential reader base for Indian language book publishing (across all the top Indian languages of Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu) is close to 500 million today! According to the National Readership Survey 2006,

  • Over the last 3 years the number of readers of dailies and magazines put together, among those aged 12 years and above, has grown from 216 million to 222 million.
  • 359 million people who can read and understand any language do not read any [newspaper or magazine]. It is not just affordability that is a constraint, since 20 million of these literate non-readers belong to the upscale SEC A and B segments

• If the excitement of an experienced publisher like David Davidar, by the diversity of the demographics of the small Canadian immigrant population and the interesting stories emerging from them, is any indicator, the sheer demographic diversity within India and the stories waiting to be told in all the Indian languages including English, is an opportunity that's visible but unseen.

Book title output in 2004 across all Indian languages

The book title output (both absolute and per capita) in each of the Indian languages in 2004 provides some insights into the nature of the publishing industry in each of these languages and how active they are.

The Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP) recently published a book titled "60 years of Book Publishing in India 1947-2007 - The story of one of the top six publishing countries in the World." The FIP claims to have compiled reliable figures and estimates the total number of titles published in India in 2004 to be 82,537. But they assume an approximate number of 5,000 titles to include books published in all the minor languages as well as all books on folk literature and religion published in all the major languages, for those titles that don't have ISBN numbers. My own guess is that the actual number of such titles, especially those on folk literature and literature are likely to be far higher than 5,000 - more like 25,000 plus.

The above data is available in Excel format here.
* The figure for English speakers is the number of people claiming to know English as their second language
Source A: 60 years of Book Publishing in India 1947-2007 p12
Source C: 1991 Indian Census
Source E: India 2001 pop = 1,027, 015, 247

Of the absolute number of new books published across Indian languages in 2004, Hindi tops at 26% of the total, followed by English with 23% - the only two languages with double digit percentages. Tamil is next at 9% Bengali and Marathi follow at about 6.5% each and Telugu, Malayalam and Gujarati are each at about 4%. Urdu and Kannada are much lower at 2.5%.

The per capita book title output for each language presents quite a different picture from that of the absolute number of titles.

Since the 2001 census language data have not been released yet ( I wonder why the delay - a question in Parliament or an RTI request may be in order), I've adopted a quick fix by taking the % data for speakers of each language from the 1991 census, and multiplying it by the total population figure from the 2001 census to get a rough estimate of the language speakers circa 2001.

The per capital book title output for the whole of India is about 8 titles per 100,000 population, far lower than what it ought to be when compared to the per capita book title output in the mature publishing markets like UK, USA, France and Germany. Of all the Indian languages, English tops at 23 titles per 100,000 speakers of English in India followed by Tamil at 11. Malayalam (8.7), Marathi (6.9), Bengali (6.3) and Gujarati (6.2) are all higher than Hindi at 5. Kannada (4.8) is higher than Telugu (4.2) and Urdu (3.9). Assamese at 7.7 is much higher than most other languages.

While English publishing is understandably more active than the other languages, Hindi publishing is far less active in terms of book title output than it ought to be given the huge number of Hindi speakers. Tamil and Malayalam are the most active of the Indian languages with the other larger languages (in terms of speakers) like Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, Gujarati and Kannada lagging behind. Despite the number of titles published in Assamese being lower than all other major languages, Assamese publishing seems to be far more active than one would expect given the fewer number of speakers. Sanskrit, Sindhi and Kashmiri have too few speakers compared to the other languages for their per capita output to be comparable.

The book publishing opportunity in India - a macro view

Might there be a positive correlation between the growth in book title output and the GDP growth for a country?. On the one hand, a growing economy and growing GDP creates a demand for more educated and knowledgeable persons in the workforce thereby driving demand for books (as a source of knowledge), and on the other hand a growing GDP results in increasing incomes and increasing consumption expenditure for various products, including books.

The following graphic which presents a map of the title output and GDP per capita for various European Countries (source: The Economics of Books , p 53) suggests a correlation.

The GDP per capita is on a scale of thousands of dollars.

Comparing the growth in GDP per capita and the number of book titles published per capita over the past few decades in various mature publishing markets (U.S.A, U.K., Britain, France and Germany) with the GDP per capita and the number of titles published per capita today in India and China, provides some food for thought.

The following comparative chart (using data that I compiled from various sources) throws some light on the trends. The data are taken from the following sources.

• The book title output in USA and the titles published per capita in USA using the title output data and population data (Source: Best and Worst of Times: Changing Business of Trade Books 1975-2002, p9 - based on data from Bowker Annuals)
• The GDP per capita for USA (Source: Louis D. Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, "The Annual Real and Nominal GDP for the United States, 1790 - Present." Economic History Services, July 27, 2007)
• The GDP per capita for various countries (Source: EconStats - GDP based on PPP per capita GDP)
• Book title output in India (Source: The Book Industry in India - Context, Challenge and Strategy, Preface - sadly, there are no authentic statistics on book title output or sales for the Indian publishing market)

The original source of the U.S. book title output data explains the technical reason for the big surge
in title output in 1997, arising out of far more comprehensive cataloguing by Bowker.

The growth in per capita book title output in America increased from about 7.6 per 100,000 people in 1950 to 43.2 per 100,000 in 2000.
In the same period, the corresponding figures for Britain increased from about 19.8 in 1950 to 212.2 in 2000. The per capita book title output per 100,000 people was about 100 for Germany and 87 for France in the year 2000.

Comparing the major publishing markets to India and China, there's an order of magnitude difference. It was estimated that about 70,000 titles were published across all languages in India in 2004 - resulting in a per capita book title output of about 6.3 per 100,000 for India. The per capita book title output per 100,000 was 9.9 for China in 2005.

For perspective, the whole of Europe with a population of about 457 million, put out 484,970 new titles in 2004 - a per capita book title ouput of 106 per 100,000 people. There were 3.9 million titles in print in Europe in 2004. (Source: European Book Publishing Statistics 2004)

India needs an order of magnitude growth in book title output (about 700,000 new titles published per year across all Indian languages and English) to reach current per capital book title ouput levels in the U.S., let alone catching up with the current levels in Britain, France or Germany.

Looking at the trends in per capita GDP growth over the last 25 years, the per capita GDP of India is near about that of the U.S. in the early 1960s. With India set for a GDP growth rate of about 8-10% per year, the book title output per capita is also likely to experience explosive growth over the next 20-25 years. Income levels are rising, consumption is booming and book sales have been growing steadily at 30% per year, even without much marketing by the trade. With half of India's population under 25 years of age, the demand for knowledge-oriented (non-fiction) books will explode in the coming years fuelled both by new entrants into the workforce as well as those already in the workforce, all keen on advancing their career prospects.

If the growth in per capita book title output is correlated to per capita GDP, then the growth in title output in India has to be led by the growth in indian language publishing rather than English language publishing for the simple reason that about 90-95% of the Indian population cannot read English. The findings of the National Readership Survey 2006 clearly show that the growth in the circulation/readership of newspapers in India is being driven by the Indian language newspapers.

• Over the last 3 years the number of readers of dailies and magazines put together among those aged 12 years and above has grown from 216 mn to 222 mn - a growth of almost 3% over last year.
  
• ... vernacular dailies have grown from 191.0 million readers to 203.6 million while English dailies have stagnated at around 21 million.
  
• As a proportion however, press reach has stabilized in urban India - at 45%. Press reach in rural India has also stayed the same at 19% -- needless to say, on a much larger population base. The number of readers in rural India (110 million) is now roughly equal to that in urban India (112 million).
  
• There is still significant scope for growth, as 359 million people who can read and understand any language do not read any publication. Of this 359 million, 68% read Hindi. It is not just affordability that is a constraint, since 20 million of these literate non-readers belong to the upscale SEC A and B segments.
  
• The time spent reading has remained the same - at 39 minutes daily on an average per day over the last year. But there has been increase in urban India (from 41 to 44 minutes daily) and decrease in rural India (from 36 to 35 minutes daily).

All these current newspaper readers and those likely to turn readers over the next decade are all potential book readers.

Our experience at New Horizon Media, over the past three years, with book publishing in Tamil indicates that the sizeable population of about 40 million literates in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu are hungry for knowledge at affordable prices (an average per copy price of about than Rs. 80 or US$2 per copy). We believe it is just the same for the 600-800 million literates across all other major Indian languages across the country.

The book publishing opportunity in India is multi-language and pan-Indian. Our aim at New Horizon Media is to publish over time in all the major Indian languages including English (which is just as much an Indian language today). Apart from publishing in Tamil, we now publish in Malayalam and English too.

Book publishing output in India from 1977-2001 - interesting trends

A study of available data on the number of books published in India every year across the various Indian languages and English throws up some interesting trends - see the graphic below. I was only able to find data for the years 1977-82, 1990-96, 1998-99, 2000-2002.

Except for English, Tamil, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi, the output in all the other Indian languages has been less than 1,000 new titles per year for over 20 years from 1977-2001.

Oriya publishing seems to have experienced a boom of sorts going from about 200 titles published per year to 1,700 titles per year in just one year in 2000-01, but was still fifth in terms of the number of titles published behind the top four languages which were English, Tamil, Hindi and Bengali.

In 2000-01, Tamil publishing experienced a surge (from about 1,900 titles to over 2,800 titles published per year) to move to second place behind English (~7,000 titles per year) by overtaking Hindi and Bengali. Hindi dropped to third place (~2,200 titles published)and Bengali was in fourth place (~2,000 titles published per year).

Marathi experienced a boom in 1994-95 going from 800 titles per year to about 1,900 titles per year, but dropped back to 1,200 titles per year after that.

The data is based on the number of titles received by the National Library at Kolkata under the Delivery of Books and Newspapers (Public Libraries) Act 1954. As per the act, every Indian publisher is required by law to send a copy of every title published to the National Library at Kolkata. The data has been gleaned from different sources: a UNESCO report for the years 1977-82, the Education Ministry site for the years 1990-96, and answers to questions raised in Parliament for the years 1998-99, 2000-2001 and 2001-2002. I've compiled together all of the above data and put it up online (MS Excel format). I sent an email to the National Library at Kolkata for data for the missing years, but have not received any response. Maybe an RTI request or another question in Parliament could do the trick!

A report on the Education Ministry web site suggests that statistics of books received by the National Library at Kolkata can be taken as an approximation and the actual number of titles published are likely to be a good 20-30% higher.

The data from National Library, however, do not present the real picture on titles published in the country because many publishers do not send a copy of each of the published titles as required under the Act. As experts suggest, the number of titles would be more by at least 20 per cent in the case of English language and by 30 percent for other languages. The book division of Chemicals & Allied Product Export Promotion Council (CAPEXIL) estimates the number of new titles published in the country at about 50,000 per annum. Even this seems to be a underestimate.

Fortunately, the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP) in recent times had compiled the latest statistics on Indian book publishing, which was published in a book titled " 50 Years of Book Publishing in India since Independence". According to this source about 11,000 publishers in India bring out nearly 60,000 titles in a year. To be more specific, in 1997 57,386 books were published in the country in 17 Indian languages and English, which had a share of about 22 per cent. The FIP data which were collected through various Indian languages publishers' associations appear to be more reliable compared to the incomplete information provided by NBC & the CAPEXIL.
Even if number of titles published in a year is known with certainty, the estimation of publishing market in India remains difficult. There is no consensus over average print runs per title and average price of a title. The print runs for a title can be as high as one lakh for a popular novel and can be even a few hundreds for another. Similar is the case with the variability in prices.

An interview with a Vietnamese publisher

A Vietnamese publisher, Mr. Vu Hoang Giang, the vice director of Nha Nam Culture and Communication Company, talks about international and domestic literature as well as the publishing business in Vietnamese in an interview.

For perspective, Vietnam's population is about 80 million with a literacy rate of over 90%.

Some excerpts from the interview.

What is Nha Nam’s strategy for 2007?

In 2007, we’ll continue to focus on international literature. At present, we are holding the copyrights of 100 books and preparing for translation. We also bought the copyrights for three novels by Orhan Pamuk: My Name is Red, The White Castle, and Snow. But we haven’t found any translators for them. It is not buying a copyright but finding a translator that is the most difficult step. Old translators often work slowly. Young ones are few. Besides, translators have their own expertise and are often good at particular styles or genres, but not so good at others.

Why are you paying so much attention to foreign writers and books? Isn’t there anything worth publishing in Vietnamese literature?

To tell you the truth, we don’t publish a lot of Vietnamese literature, not because we ignore it, but because there aren’t many good works of literature in Vietnam. To publishers, as to every businessperson, one of the most important things is the source of outputs. International literature is an endless field, with hundreds, or even thousands of great works and writers which have never been introduced in Vietnam. On the contrary, there isn’t much in our own literature. Sometimes we still do the fool’s work of screening the sand for the gold dust of Vietnamese literature simply because of our hope for it. Very few Vietnamese writers can write upon orders from publishers. When they write, these writers often create whatever they want without caring about public demands, and send their drafts to us. What tires us most is to reject those drafts!

Does Nha Nam expect anything from Vietnam’s membership in the WTO?

We don’t expect any great change in the publishing business. Whether Vietnam joins the WTO or not, private companies like us have to put the high quality of our products as the first priority. We have to create a brand name for ourselves. Brand names are a must for survival, especially in the globalised environment. Brand names are like antibiotics.

India's growing clout in English language publishing

Just about 7% of India's population can read English according to the 1991 Census (2001 census language data is yet to be released). But even that 7% works out to a substantial 65 million potential English readers. For perspective, compare that to the number of English speakers in USA (about 215 million), number of English speakers in Canada (about 20 million) the entire populations of Britain (about 60 million) and Australia (about 20 million).

India's clout is only likely to grow further in the coming decades in the global market for English language publishing.

David Davidar, former publisher of Penguin India and currently publisher of Penguin Canada, is quoted as saying,

“Canada is a mature market that is growing slowly, whereas India is an emerging market that is the fastest growing English language market in the world today. It is estimated that the Indian market could be bigger than Canada and Australia in the next 10-15 years.”

Richard Marcus writing in the online magazine, Blogcritics wonders why American and even British publishers haven't shown much interest yet in India as sizeable English language market.

What amazes me is how [British and American publishers] seem to have forgotten, or even worse not noticed, the potential audience beyond the confines of our continent and the British Isles. American companies could perhaps be excused on grounds of ignorance, but for the Brits to forget about India and the rest of the Commonwealth nations (the countries that were formerly colonies of England) is just silly. They were the ones who forced the English language down their throats in the first place.

India has probably one of the largest, educated English-speaking populations in the world right now. Its economy is booming, and more and more of her people have the money to spend on books and other forms of leisure. How hard would it be for an imprint to reach an agreement with an Indian press and start delivering titles for publication?

But with the exception of Penguin India, no one seems to be doing very much to take specific advantage of the market. Even Penguin treats India like another foreign country and gives preference to American publications. What this means is that while Penguin can dump as many American-published titles as it wants onto the Indian market, it only exports a few Indian-published titles to the States.

While this does provide a market for whatever is being published in the States, it does nothing to properly develop the Indian market. Penguin needs to remind itself that if it wants the world to know more than the names of one or two authors from India it needs to start treating India with the respect it deserves.

That means that her authors should be given the same treatment as their American counterparts and not be limited in the number of titles they are allowed to export to the American market. The best way to develop a solid audience base is to ensure that the authors of the home country are able to thrive. Keeping their names in the public eye as much as possible is a reminder that Indian writers are just as important as American or British.

If American publishers would open their eyes to the fact that English is spoken in more then a few countries around the world ,they might find their sales figures rising. Sign on a couple of Indian authors and publish them simultaneously in India and the United States. It might take awhile for sales to develop in the United States, but that will be compensated by sales in India.

At the encouragement of a friend of mine in India I sent my manuscript to Penguin India for consideration; I haven't heard anything from them yet, but that doesn't bother me. When they publish the book I expect that it will be available in Canada because that's where I'm from, as well as sold as India, but I doubt it will be for sale in the United States.

It used to be that without the American market your book couldn't really sell enough to make you much money. But times have changed, and America is not the only large English speaking market anymore. American publishers need to remember that - if they want their business to continue to grow. Otherwise they could find themselves being left behind and no longer as important as they think they are.

A third of new Czech books are translations

Prague Daily Monitor provides some background about the Czech language book industry, catering to a market of about 10 million Czechs.

Some 15,000 publications are annually issued in the Czech Republic, which is three times more than in former Czechoslovakia, Jaroslav Cisar from the Association of Czech Booksellers and Publishers told CTK on the opening day of the BookWorld fair today.

The number of publishers has been increasing, but books are published in smaller editions, Cisar said. Fiction books are published in editions of 1500, while poetry books of 800 volumes. About twenty books a year sell more than 20,000. Czechs have shown growing interest in books for children as their sales increased by half over the past five years. He said that it was a surprise that Czechs are not interested in electronic books and Internet publishing houses. People still prefer buying books in classical book shops.

The highest number of books, or over 16,000, was published in 2003. Cisar said that one-third of new books are translations, mainly from English, German and French. He said that the Czech Republic is remarkable with the high number of translated publications.

The number of books translated from Slovak and Russian has been growing recently, he said. The Slovak book market is considerably smaller and Slovak publishers therefore issue some of their books also in Czech. As far as Russian books are concerned, negative attitude to Russian culture has gradually been lowering after the 1989 downfall of communism in the country.

There are some 3500 publishing houses registered in the Czech Republic and about 400 of them issue books regularly.

For perspective, a Radio Praha report from March 2006 says

A population forecast released this week by the EU statistics office Eurostat predicts that by the year 2050 the number of Czechs will drop from 10 million to 8,800,000. Without immigration, the population might plummet to 8.1 million.