Publishers are boycotting the Ministry of Culture

All members of the Association of Professional Publishers of Serbia, part of the Association of Publishers and Booksellers of Serbia, as well as part of independent publishers, decided to boycott Book purchase competition for public libraries, which was recently announced by the Ministry of Culture.

Then, they will not participate in joint performances at international book fairs, if those performances are organized by the Ministry of Culture, nor will they allow their books to be exhibited at those performances.

And, thirdly: until further notice, they suspend the delivery of mandatory copies of books to the National Library of Serbia and the Library of Matica Srpska.

"We made the decision to boycott the purchase tender due to ignoring the publisher's proposal, due to the poor purchase model, the shortcomings of which we have been pointing out for years, due to the reduction of the purchase budget, due to the Ministry's attempt to purchase two years of publishing production with the budget provided for one year, due to the non-transparency of the tender, due to restrictive conditions with retroactive effect, and because the Ministry's book policy and the conditions of the purchase tender threaten the interests of readers, libraries and publishers," their statement reads.

They believe that "if the Ministry decides to implement this competition in spite of everything, it will not be able to hide the obvious facts from the public: the largest number of Serbian publishers will not participate in this competition and it will not cover the overwhelming majority of the most important books published in the Serbian language in 2024."

They warn that the consequences of such a decision by the Ministry will be clear: public libraries will be left without most of the relevant books, readers will not be able to use library services that they have already paid for, and fewer books will be published in the Serbian language in the coming year.

And yet, they state that in the coming period they will try to find alternative ways of cooperation with libraries, in order to provide users with access to books.

For now, about fifty publishers are behind this decision, including the biggest - Laguna and Vulkan.