Counterfeit books have increased in volume – Kommersant FM

The turnover of counterfeit copies of books in the country has grown sharply: from January to August 2023, it doubled year-on-year and reached 1 billion rubles. This was reported by the Eksmo-AST publishing group and the Russian Book Union. The vast majority of sales of counterfeit book products occur through marketplaces. At the same time, as market participants note, prices there can be one and a half to two times lower than those of official suppliers.

Counterfeits mainly come to Russia from Central Asia, said Ekaterina Kozhanova, director of strategic communications of the Eksmo AST publishing group:

“The main source of illegal products are entrepreneurs, publishing houses, and printing houses located in the CIS countries. To implement it, they use both marketplaces and, accordingly, offline retail directly in their countries, taking advantage of the fact that the book infrastructure in them is poorly developed, but there is a demand for bestsellers, and truly original publications can cost more.

But after people buy books at a low price, the publishing house receives complaints that the paper is not appropriate, the chapters may be mixed up, the text has not been printed, and so on.

Basically, piracy concerns the most liquid positions, that is, bestsellers. These are books that people are confident in and that they want to purchase in paper form and put on the shelf. But, having made a choice in favor of unoriginal products, readers are then disappointed, because there is not even confidence that the text corresponds to the original.

Discussions are currently underway with marketplaces about what solutions may be available in connection with this situation. Of course, they can’t just take down the ads.

But the fact is that there are absolutely outrageous cases when a supplier simply replaces the letter in the name “Eksmo”, puts a zero at the end and sells books perfectly.

We hope that quick decisions will be made on such episodes in the very near future.

As for book retail in the CIS countries, the issue here should be resolved at the level of government interaction. Complaints that are sent to the governments of the respective countries remain unanswered, so intervention is necessary here, since already this year we see that the damage is quite significant.”

Publishers often learn about the distribution of counterfeit copies of books from dissatisfied readers. Svetlana Kolesnikova, head of the trade marketing department of the Alpina group, also spoke about consumer complaints to Kommersant FM:

“Every day we identify new sellers of counterfeit products. Our readers also write about this, who buy books on marketplaces and receive a book that is not of the quality that was stated.

The distribution of illegal products occurs mainly on marketplaces because it is very easy to access this site. Anyone can open their own store and sell books.

The average consumer does not understand who is offering the book – a publishing house, or some bookstore, or an individual entrepreneur, or a private person. Therefore, he sees the most affordable option, but in the end, instead of a good book, he gets a counterfeit.”

According to the Eksmo-AST publishing group, last year online stores and marketplaces became leaders in terms of sales of legal paper books. Online sales reached RUB 36.5 billion.

It is possible to fight counterfeits in the book publishing business, but this requires additional investment, noted Alexey Popovichev, executive director of the Rusbrand association:

“We are conducting a fairly constructive dialogue with marketplaces in order to speed up their response to identified counterfeit products and block those pages where they are sold.

But this fight, of course, is quite difficult, so I can advise Russian publishers to pay more attention to identifying the sources of illegal publications. As previous practice has shown, the struggle can be successful.

If we are talking about products in wide demand, then those companies that invested funds and, for example, hired special detective agencies to identify production facilities or distribution channels, were able to achieve very good results.

In general, our legislation gives the copyright holder every opportunity to effectively resist these violators. But, unfortunately, the profits in this area are so high that their ranks are constantly growing.”

Two years ago, an underground printing house was discovered in the Kurgan region, where about 50 thousand counterfeit copies of books from the Harry Potter series were printed. The damage to the copyright holder was then estimated at 22 million rubles.

And in 2022, the Eksmo-Ast publishing group identified illegal paper copies of about 200 of its books on marketplaces. Among them are “Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes” by Guzel Yakhina and Phil Knight’s non-fiction “Shoe Salesman. The history of Nike.

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Andrey Zagorsky