Last month, we went to Poland for a holiday. In fact, I’m writing up that trip as a small non-fiction book, titled IT’S 10AM, WHY AM I STILL SOBER?, to be released next month. (Ahem) Okay, I’ll get over myself now but the reason I mention it is because, as a writer, of course I was going to include my observations on Polish bookshops. What will be in the book is an abridged version of what I’m setting down now because I don’t think the average reader is really interested in the minutiae of book innards.
Bookstores appear to still be big business in Poland, although one woman in a bookstore in Sosnowiec (Sauce-no-vee-ets) complained that, since the small chain she worked for had been bought out by Germans, she was forced to give bookshelf space to non-book merchandise, much to her personal dismay.
The bookstores stock a lot of local works. A lot. By that, I mean a shitload. You can find Nora Roberts, Robert Ludlum and even Jack Vance translated into Polish (I say “even Jack Vance” because when was the last time you saw a Vance paperback still in print?), but the bulk of the offerings are books by Polish writers. Genre fiction, especially fantasy, occupies shelf after shelf and, when you crack open an edition, there are several things that strike you.
One, the typeface is rather large, as are the margins. The idea of maximising print on a page in order to minimise production costs is one that obviously hasn’t occurred to Polish publishers.
Two, the paperback size of choice is trade not mass. That is, the larger-format paperbacks. Hardcovers also seem to be popular and there is usually a decent audiobook section tucked away in one corner of the bookshop.
When was the last time you saw a healthy audiobook section in your bookshop? The media is cassette tape and CDs, which proves that yes indeed, Poland is behind, say, North America in terms of digital books and general book tech. But now we have something that I found rather interesting:
Three, the quality of the final book trounces your average Western print book. Let’s take one example. There is a current anthology out called “Deszcze Niespokojne”, which roughly translates to “Unsettled (Driving) Rains”. It contains twelve stories of alternate happenings during World War Two. Each story has three pieces of black-and-white artwork associated with it. I’m no art expert, but they look like they were all done in pencil by the same artist. The first piece of artwork takes up one page and encapsulates elements of the story you’re about to read. As you turn the page to begin, there is a second, smaller and different piece, like a drop-cap drawing, if you will. And, at the end of the story, there is a third piece, centred, below the last line.
There is also the layout. (And, for us digital authors, I note that this print edition has the Table of Contents at the back of the book.) Each individual story has the following layout:
Right facing page – blank
(Turn page)
Left facing page – a bio of the author
Right facing page – the author’s name again and the name of the story
(Turn page)
Left facing page – blank
Right facing page – full-page illustration of the story
(Turn page)
Left facing page – blank
Right facing page – the story begins a third down the page with its own introductory miniature artwork piece
So, for this one anthology, we have thirty-six separate and distinct drawings plus what we in the West would consider a criminal waste of six times twelve, or seventy-two, pages devoted to nothing more than sparse formatting and some artwork.
For the purposes of this post, I put two books side by side: the Polish one I mentioned earlier and another recent anthology, “Engineering Infinity”. Here’s a look at their formats. Note the larger Polish book:
Here is the interior of ENGINEERING INFINITY, showing the title page. The thing to note is the economical use of space. One story finishes, the other begins on the very next page, with only a paragraph for the author’s bio (I’m not making any kind of recommendation here or singling out this particular author for any reason, I just chose this page at random):
Here is an interior of DESZCZE NIESPOKOJNE, showing the succession of pages I described above, choosing the first story in the book because I didn’t want to bend the spine while scanning. First, there’s the author bio and the story title:
Then there’s the blank page and artwork:
Then there’s yet another blank page (that the author used for a poem fragment) before the start of the story proper (and note the second piece of artwork):
And there’s a third piece of artwork, roughly the size of the one you see above, at the end of the story. The size of the Polish book is, as I said before, closer to a trade paperback, there is ample white space between and around lines, and the entire anthology clocks in at almost six hundred and forty pages.
The recommended retail price of ENGINEERING INFINITY is US$8.00 (if you shop Amazon and live in the States). I paid US$11.07 for it (after a 20% discount) at The Book Depository. The retail price of DESZCZE NIESPOKOJNE is US$12.00 which, when you think about it, is not a bad deal at all.
I mention these prices because USians have an unrealistic picture of what paperbacks cost. They assume that, just because they pay US$8 for an average paperback, everybody else in the world pays the same amount. That’s not true.
The takeaway point from this is, Poland produces a superior print product at a price point that nearly matches or is a little cheaper than what the rest of the English-reading world pays. I’m sure they’re not aware of it, but it was pretty obvious to me. To go back to my recollections:
Other novels and anthologies I perused also had that same attention to detail that drew my eye in the first place: size, formatting, with an extra “fillip” of aesthetics (with the exception of a series of mass paperback-sized “classics” by such luminaries as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen). You get the impression that buying a book in Poland is something significant. Yes of course, there are the words, but there is also great care lavished on the way the words are presented. My personal opinion is that the average Pole would look with horror on the USD7.99 paperbacks that cram Wal-Mart shelves. As anyone who’s involved in the publishing world will also attest, the Poles have an unbeatable reputation for cover art. This was as true during the days of the Soviet bloc as it is now. Their enthusiasm for literature cannot be underestimated.
And that’s why I wonder whether the Kindle phenomenon that’s sweeping North America and the United Kingdom…may not gain as much traction in European countries where there’s a different mindset at play.
Okay, and now we come to the digital part of this post.
Books are incredibly popular throughout Poland. The Czech Republic boasts the highest book-reading population per capita in entire Europe. Moreover, the books these people read are different to what you and I are used to. Individual artwork, two-tone printing, border flourishes. And that’s just for the fiction!
It’s obvious that the philosophy that led to the printing of paperbacks in the Anglo world is completely different to the philosophy that led to paperback printing in Poland. And that tells me that the two sets of people perceive “value” in different ways.
The Anglo reader — faced with a rather utilitarian, monocolour typeface on cheap paper — sees value in the words themselves. Does it matter, then, how the words are presented? Probably not.
The Polish reader — faced with oodles of white space, custom drawings, two-colour border flourishes on good paper — sees value in the entire package. Does it matter, then, how the words are presented? Yeah, it probably does.
I’m not making any surefire predictions here. If ebooks are priced less than print books, then of course there’s going to be an uptake of ebooks across Europe. However, we have to realise that we’re also dealing with a population of a different mindset. They are as interested in the packaging as the words themselves. I translate this to mean:
There is a lesson there for digital authors and that’s to make our ebooks as interesting as possible. Ebooks don’t have the costs associated with multi-colour printing, so we can afford to let our imaginations soar.
I’ve taken this tack, particularly with the PDF version of THE CHECK YOUR LUCK AGENCY (not the Smashwords version, but the one appearing at XinXii and AllRomanceeBooks), adding the kind of flourishes that I saw in Polish print books. The feedback has been very positive. It’s like showing the reader that we care to present our words in a way that puts them first, that tries to give them an experience they’ll find enjoyable beyond the text itself. There is certainly an extra investment of time involved in doing this, but that investment dwarfs the cost of doing the same thing in print.
