OREANDA-NEWS  The demand for business literature in Russia is falling - in February, according to various publishers, sales decreased by 10-28% year—on-year in physical terms. But some categories, on the contrary, are growing rapidly: in particular, sales of books on crisis management increased by 68% in pieces, according to LitErs. Wildberries talks about the popularity of books about investing. Market participants attribute readers' increased interest in the topic to attempts to conduct business through economic turbulence.

Sales of business literature continue to fall, interviewed participants of the book market told Kommersant. So, in "LitErs" noted that in February sales of such books in pieces decreased by 28% year-on-year: "This is primarily due to a drop in interest in the genre itself." Alexey Ilyin, CEO of the Alpina Group, estimates a drop in sales in the category at 25%. "They have returned to the indicators of 2021, but they have already begun to recover," the top manager clarifies.

According to Olga Kiseleva, the head of the editorial group of the publishing house, Mann, Ivanov and Ferber (MYTH), sales of business literature are stable relative to last year: "The difference from 2022 is less than 1%." Other interlocutors of Kommersant in the book market talk about a 10% drop. Eksmo-AST did not respond to the request.

In general, sales in the Russian market of books excluding educational literature, according to Eksmo-AST, increased by 10% in 2022, reaching 109 billion rubles. The number of books and brochures issued in Russia by the end of 2022 decreased by 0.3%, to 108 thousand publications, according to the report of the Russian Book Chamber (see Kommersant of February 28).

In May 2022, distributors have already noted that the demand for sales of books about business, investment and self-development has fallen, while the demand for fiction, on the contrary, has increased (see Kommersant of May 30, 2022). Then market participants explained the trend by the economic situation: business books "are read when you can think about development and systemic improvement."

However, some categories in this segment are already showing growth in 2023. Thus, sales of publications on the topic of "anti-crisis management" in kind increased by 68% in February year-on-year, according to LitRes: "In conditions of turbulence, referring to the cases and experience of authors on crisis periods can give answers how to behave in similar circumstances." The top in this category in February 2023 was headed by Maxim Batyrev's book "Management during a Storm, published last year. 15 rules of crisis management," the company says. In it, the author tells how companies in Russia survived in the 1990s, 2008, 2014 and 2020.