The Ukrainian Book Trade project 2005-2008 aimed at enhanced access to reliable professional book trade information, a greater variety of Ukrainian publishers’ books across the country, and improved professional skills and standards of publishers and booksellers, was completed in November 2008 with excellent results.
With the assistance of the project, the Ukrainian Publishers and Booksellers Association launched a book trade portal for professionals UABooks.info (http://uabooks.info).
Dzherela M and Summit Books jointly set up the “100 Hundred Books” (“100 tysiach knyzhok”) distribution network with regional centres in fourteen major cities across the country: Chernivtsi, Dnipropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kherson, Khmelnytsky, Lviv, Mykolayiv, Poltava, Rivne, Vinnytsya, Odessa, Simferopol, Uzhorod, and Zaporizhya. Moreover, they developed an online Books in Print catalogue of books available on the Ukrainian market with a website for professional users (http://www.vsiknygy.org.ua) and a book information website for the general public (http://vsiknygy.net.ua), offering book reviews, interviews with authors, announcements of new books, and other items from the book market.
Extensive training for publishers and booksellers was conducted in Kiev, Lviv, Kharkiv and other regional capital cities by Book Market Research (Krakow, Poland, http://wirtualnywydawca.pl/) and the consultants from the Netherlands Guus Schut and Jeroen Kans. In addition, trainers’ training for booksellers was provided in The Netherlands in 2007 and in 2008. Goethe-Institut joined the project and keeps organising seminars for publishers and booksellers (http://www.goethe.de/ins/ua/kie/ver/ukindex.htm).
In the frames of the project Guus Schut wrote a manual Bookselling for Bookstore Managers and recommendations Book trade in Ukraine: the next few years.
“GfK Ukraine” (www.gfk.com) conducted the first ever complex study of Ukrainian book market: six ways of consumer’s study, segmentation study and publishers and booksellers survey.
(Based on information from CEEBP Newsletter, Amsterdam, December 2008, Number 24, Editors: Vera Ebels, Christina Zorich: http://www.ceebp.org/).
