The Eksmo trading house began selling Prince Harry’s memoirs Spare (Spare) in the original language on Russian marketplaces. The general director of the publishing house, Yevgeny Kapyev, told Vedomosti that the trading house plans to import other bestsellers in English into the country.
Kapiev told the newspaper that Prince Harry’s memoirs, with a print run of about 100 books, were purchased from a wholesale distributor in the country where the book was officially released in English. The head of Eksmo did not specify which country he was talking about.
According to him, such purchases allow the buyer not to enter into a licensing contract, which, in turn, makes it possible to deliver books to Russia by authors and publications who decided to leave the Russian market after the start of a full-scale war in Ukraine. This decision, in particular, was made by Stephen King, JK Rowling, Neil Gaiman, as well as Penguin Random House, which owns the rights to Prince Harry’s memoirs.
Kapiev clarified that sales of books in the original are only an additional source of income for the Eksmo publishing house: they amount to up to 10 million rubles a year and do not exceed 0.1% of the publishing house’s revenue.
However, in conditions when many bestsellers are not published in the Russian Federation, readers who are fluent in English may increase the demand for books with original text, Kapiev believes.
Prince Harry’s memoirs caused a big scandal even before the release, and after the release they immediately became a bestseller. In Russia, the book was published in the form of a summary, that is, a retelling of the main theses without direct quotation. The head of Eksmo, Yevgeny Kapiev, said that the publishing group considers the project with the summary 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.”
