Bestseller close to text – Newspaper Kommersant No. 28 (7473) of 02/15/2023

A number of Russian publishers are preparing to circumvent the ban on the release of international bestsellers in the Russian Federation with the help of a summary – a retelling without direct quoting. Eksmo-AST, in particular, will publish Prince Harry’s memoirs in this format, and Smart Reading publishing house will also publish its version of this book. Eksmo-AST considers summaries an alternative to a compulsory license that can “ensure the availability” of popular non-fiction books for Russians. But not all market participants consider this path acceptable, and lawyers warn of the risk of penalties if the retelling is close to the original text.

The Eksmo-AST group (it includes Eksmo, AST, Bombora, etc.) told Kommersant that it would release Prince Harry’s memoirs Spare (Spare) in the Russian Federation in a summary format, which involves a retelling of the main theses. The book will be released on February 16 in audio and electronic formats and in printed form at the end of February as part of the CrossReads project of the Bombora publishing house. The first print run will be 3,000 copies. Another version of the summary “Spare” in audiobook format from the publishing house Smart Reading will be released on February 15 in LitRes. They specified that the book was prepared at the request of the service.

Abroad, “Spare” was released on January 10, Penguin Random House, which owns the rights to it, stopped working with the Russian market in 2022 after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. “The summary will reflect the key ideas of the book without using excerpts from it: the author of the summary read the book in English and retold it in her own language,” Eksmo CEO Evgeny Kapiev explained to Kommersant. “Like Smart Reading, we rely on the citation law” .

According to the top manager, the group sees the project 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.” Eksmo-AST is already planning to release Jen Sinsero’s book “Ne Noah” using the same mechanism, the rights to which ended last spring and have not been renewed.

Maria Kopachevskaya, Chief Editor of Smart Reading, clarified that the company has been specializing in the summary format for ten years, but now it has become especially relevant: “The share in our catalog of summaries for books not published in Russian is growing due to the current situation, as we we try to focus on what is inaccessible to Russian-speaking readers, but valuable to them.” In Bookmate, “there are no plans to release books in summary format yet,” but similar books from partners are available on the service.

The reason for the popularity of the summary, the publishers say, is not only the restriction of rights. “Readers have less and less time to read or listen to one or another non-fiction in its entirety,” explains Evgeny Selivanov, director of the content development department at LitRes Group.

However, not all market participants consider the summary to be a good move. Publishing house Individuum is not going to use the format to circumvent sanctions, says its editor-in-chief Felix Sandalov: “Maybe officially retelling without permission and does not violate the law, but purely humanly, this is not worth doing.” The method will have a bad effect on relations with copyright holders, because, in fact, it is a “gray scheme,” he believes. The publisher of Ad Marginem Press, Mikhail Kotomin, also has a negative attitude towards this path: “We will not go along it.” Enough texts published in the public domain (public domain.— “b”), and those for which the rights are freely sold, he says.

Another interlocutor of Kommersant among publishers considers the release of books in retelling a “high-risk precedent” for the entire market: “To allow piracy in one form or another – and the summary format can be considered veiled piracy – means to throw the Russian market of legal content back several years” .

According to the law, quoting can only be carried out for scientific, polemical, critical, informational, and educational purposes: in the event of a dispute, a Russian publisher will have to prove that these are the purposes, and not entertainment, says Yulia Yarnykh, a partner at Semenov & Pevzner. “If the summary is two or three pages, it can probably be considered a description of the book. If a book of 500 pages has a “retelling” of the same 500 pages, and even more so as close as possible to the original text, this is obviously already a copyright infringement,” says Sergey Zuykov, managing partner of Zuykov and Partners. The maximum amount of compensation for the illegal use of rights is twice the value of the books sold, he clarifies. However, Yulia Yarnykh notes, many foreign copyright holders “prefer not to file suits in Russian courts now.”

Valeria Lebedeva