Book publishing in the languages of the peoples of Russia: The problems and perspectives on the basis of 2019–2023 statistics

Abstract

The problems of the book publishing in the languages of the peoples of  Russia appeared to be pressing within the context of the national language policy of the Russian Federation. The market conditions in the contemporary book publishing business have negatively influenced this sector of the All-Russian publisher's repertory in many respects. The state publishing statistics evidences on this and enables to define the obvious leaders and outsiders among the concrete regions and languages: the Tatarian, Yakutian and Bashkirian, etc. languages are among the leaders, and practically all languages of the small peoples of the North and the East of Russia belong to the latter group. This is also true for the printed periodicals, i.e. newspapers, magazines and journals. At the same time, the negative trends exist in the sphere of reading because the motivation for the developing reading decreases with dominating «light», or leisure-time reading. The authors propose to improve the situation through cooperation of publishing activities of former autonomous republics and regions and/or by establishment of the specialized All-Russian publishing house «Friendship of Peoples» with appropriate resources.