It is very possible that there will be no purchase of books for libraries this year. In translation, this means that publishers will be left without a significant income, and libraries will be left without books to renew their fund.
Money from the budget was allocated for that purpose a long time ago, and everything was fine until it got stuck in the Ministry of Culture and Information.
A month and a half after the last element of the purchase process was completed, the Ministry of Culture did not issue a Decision on the allocation of funds to publishers and distributors under the Competition for the purchase of publications for libraries for the year 2022.
The Association of Professional Publishers of Serbia (UPIS) therefore sent a letter to the Ministry of Culture today, calling on them to fulfill their obligation urgently.
The mentioned procedure for selecting books for purchase is two-stage. When the Ministry announces the competition, the publishers send proposals for their editions, the expert committee selects them, and forwards its selection to the libraries. Libraries then estimate how many pieces of which title they need, send that list to the Ministry, and the Ministry makes a Decision based on which it forwards money to publishers for the books it bought from them in order to send them to libraries.
This year, the Ministry announced a competition for the purchase of books on May 4, at a time when the purchase should already be completed - as stated in today's letter UPIS. The decisions of the Book Purchase Commission were published in July on the website of the National Library of Serbia, while libraries selected books from the list of proposed titles by July 29.
Only the Ministry did not fulfill its obligation. Why? The unofficial answer is that we are waiting for a new government.
It takes two months from the issuance of the Ministry's Decision to the payment of the money. This means that even if the Ministry announced that Decision tomorrow, the money would be paid to the publishers in mid-November. Therefore, it would not arrive before the Book Fair, which for any publisher implies a considerable expenditure.
The Ministry of Culture later today, after the reaction of UPIS, announced on its website that it "appointed a new commission with the aim of fulfilling the regularity and legality of the entire procedure, bearing in mind the necessity of complying with the provisions of the Law on Prevention of Corruption, which refer to the conflict of interest of the appointed members of the commission, since the members of the commission had the obligation to sign a declaration that they were not in conflict of interest, which was not done."
Why they noticed this irregularity and removed it only now is not explained.
However, this change is unlikely to resolve the matter. The real situation, which implies the beginning of the work of the new Government, indicates that this calendar year will end sooner than the publishers will receive their money and the libraries will receive their books.
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