LITERATURE OR "ELECTRONIC LITERATURE"?

It is thought that people are reading less than they used to, that fewer good books are being written and that in general the population of the Earth is getting more and more stupid from hour to hour. But there are others who think that it is merely the format of the prose that has changed. There is less hard-copy literature about, but a lot more people are reading on their mobile phones and special readers. Audio books have started to become popular. Besides that, our contemporaries read news, blogs, prose on the Internet, each others' thoughts and essays by popular "progressive" bloggers. Who needs hard-copy books these days?

Who is invading the paper industry?

The standard print run of authors in Baku is 250, maximum 300 copies. In some cases, books are sold in the underground stations. These are thrillers with a reported print run of 1,000 copies. But there is very little choice, and this is rather an exception than the rule.

Aleksandr Xakimov, a biologist, publicist and science fiction writer, has set himself the serious task of publishing one book a year. Moreover, the print run of his books is 250-300 copies. "By today's standards a print run just over 200 copies simply amounts to unprecedented optimism," he says, "and if we recall how many books used to be printed in our country which used to have "the biggest reading public", then this state of affairs is simply like a drop in the ocean".

"It seems to me that probably over the last 20 years the love of reading has declined, and this tendency is not just true of our country," the writer asserts. "For example, the well known Israeli science fiction writer Daniel Kluger recently had his own book published in a print run of 250 copies, as did our former fellow-countryman Andrey Ismayilov, who now lives in St. Petersburg, but it is thought that both authors live in places where there are many creative, reading members of the intelligentsia.

Throughout the world the hard-copy book trend does not really seem to have a bright future. But the market for electronic publications, which make up the lion's share in the West, has also come to a standstill at the moment. Today, in the USA e-books account for 20 to 25 per cent of the book market as such, according to various estimates; e-book sales are continuing to grow at a dynamic rate, but not as fast as they were three years ago.

On the whole, although the tablets with their iCloud apps providing access to books and the smartphones and other splendid devices make reading convenient in every way, prose is no longer being read as much as it was before

Besides the difficulties incurred in publishing books, illustrations are also a big problem for Baku's authors. They have frequently have to foot the bill for them out of their own pockets, not to mention the cost of cover design. You see, book illustration is a specialised art. Not every artist who can create his own oil paintings is able to design interesting illustrations for a text. That art has its own rules and regulations. This is why the authors often have the cover designs and illustrations done by amateur artists, which means that they are not always of such a high quality as desired.

Book promotion and "books to suit everyone's taste"

At the dawn of book printing in the 15th century, the church was engaged in the spread and promotion of book printing in Europe. Naturally the first book that they "promoted" was the Bible. Then the list was extended with the works of Aristotle, [the Italian Dominican friar] Thomas Aquinas and many other philosophers from antiquity and contemporary philosophers at the time. Over the last two centuries magazines and publishing houses have been directly involved in promoting literature, printing reviews of books by reputable colleagues and critics and sometimes even printing excerpts from novels.

The publishing houses staked on advertisements in magazines, recommendations on the radio and TV. Quite often when authors were launching their books, an important part would be played by a screen version of their early works. This is precisely how Ray Bradbury and Stephen King achieved such great popularity. Today King is the most popular modern author and more than 350 million of his books have been printed.

Another effective way of advertising books is by meeting readers and giving presentations of new books.

At the dawn of the "e-book era" the ways in which authors "promote" their works in the world have changed, but not as considerably as might appear at first glance. Just as before, authors are helped in this by screen versions of their books, ordinary advertisements, presentations of new books and meetings with readers.  These methods have been supplemented with advertisements on the Internet. 

Besides, the major publishing houses have found a new and very effective way of advertising. The "whales" of the book business like Amazon and Barnes & Noble are known to be putting out their own "kindles", special tablets for book reading. When readers buy one of these tablets, they automatically subscribe to adverts for new books. The tablet does thereby take note of each user's literary preferences and then always recommends to him or her books appropriate to their taste. 

If it's ours, it can't be any good

Something phenomenal is happening with our prose. Whereas the Americans prefer American prose, the French prefer French prose, the Russians like their own prose best, in Azerbaijan the situation is somewhat strange. Both authors and publishers are literally unanimous when it comes to the bias of local readers. If the author is Azerbaijani, then the book is not thought to be worth wasting money on.

"Here people think that, if something is being done in Azerbaijan, it can't be good, must be of poor quality; unfortunately, readers don't like to read about us, about what is happening here now," says Ismayil Imanov, one of our well known modern authors. "Therefore, our authors have to do everything they can to change this opinion, so the only correct and honest way to do this is to put out works which are as good as they can possibly be.

Nika Musavi, a young author of experimental prose, also speaks about prejudices. "I cannot explain the reason for this, but readers are subconsciously convinced that local authors are not capable of writing anything really interesting and of high quality," she says. "If they do buy their books, it is most likely because they are curious about them or friends have actively recommended them."

Sahbaz Xuduoglu, the head of the "Qanun" publishing house which is putting out the lion's share of foreign prose and a few Azerbaijani books holds a much more hardline view. "There are quite objective reasons why readers frequently do not choose local authors. First and foremost, it is the authors themselves who are to blame," the publisher thinks. "They need to spend more time working on the texts, for you see, an author's talent is like a river, it will always find somewhere to flow, no matter what prejudices exist."

It should also be noted that the state of affairs in Azerbaijani literature today is such that authors not only do not regard literature as a means of earning money, but more often than a way of suffering a loss. "The fact is that with low print runs, the cost of each individual book is high, that is approximately four or five manats," Aleksandr Xakimov tells us. "And considering that the local reading public does not want to shell out for works by Azerbaijani writers, the books have to be sold at a price barely above that of producing them." The authors end up with part of even this modest print run remaining unsold and have to save up for the publication of the next book.

 A bit of history

Strange as it may seem, book publication has never been a very lucrative business, but the first rather small publishing houses only started to appear in Europe in the 18th century. Naturally, there are occasional examples of great literary successes. So, it is said that that back in Boston bay in the 1860s people would throng the quays, when a boat docked, which was stacked high with novels by the popular 19th-century author Charles Dickens. But, if you take, for example, Russian literature, that is the classics, it is quite a different story, strange as that may seem.

The well known journalist, writer and literary historian Dmitriy Bykov has recounted that in the main those authors who are today referred to as writers of Russian classics did not live off the income from their writing. "More often than not they had an additional source of earnings. Most of the writers of the classics worked as journalists, newspaper editors and even wrote advertisements. Even Pushkin who is regarded as "our very own", got most of his income from his estate. He did moreover set up and head the [Russian social and political] magazine "Sovremennik". As Bykov frequently recounts at his lectures, the only Russian writer of classics who lived off the income from his books was Lev Tolstoy. He did moreover live on his own Yasnaya Polyana estate, where he didn't need much to live on. 

The same is true today. Only the authors of obvious best-sellers can live off their royalties, as well as those who write "easy reading for journeys on the underground" and Chick Lit and Lad Lit pocket books, the former containing love stories and the latter tales of hatred targetted solely at male readers. The authors of pocket books often write from two to eight books a year, from which they can make a living. 

Thus, in drawing parallels with the past, it is easy to understand that there is nothing particularly tragic about what has happened to literature. It is simply that it is quite common for people to say and sincerely feel that times are only changing for the worst. According to [the Greek philosopher] Socrates and [Greek poet] Hesiod, and then [the Russian poets] Gavrila Derzhavin and Mikhail Lermontov, the best minds of their time were advising that world culture was going down the drain. If they could have known of the millions of future hand-written and printed monuments of culture, of the Nobel prize for literature, they would not have been so categorical about it.

So, while man exists, he is capable of indulging in dreams and using his imagination. Man will go on changing and understanding the world and will of course create new images. There was a time when man recorded the images born of his awareness in cuneiform characters and on papyrus, then on parchment and rice paper and today on readers, phones and on the Internet, and no-one knows what is coming tomorrow.