By Ben Blushi

THE MISTAKE OF ALBANIAN PUBLISHERS

I had the opportunity to attend a parliamentary session where several publishers were called to give their opinions on the book law, and after two boring hours I understood nothing.

So I didn't understand if the publishers were for the law, against the law, or had some proposals to change the law.

But when it became clear that the publishers had gone to the meeting without any purpose, they still achieved a small victory, although this was not their intention either.

With their out-of-context text, they confused the deputies and thus a session that was supposed to improve the book law turned into a conversation where they talked about everything, including my Facebook.

Having known Albania's publishers for years, I have come to understand that there is nothing they hate more than each other.

But even though they disagree at all, they always agree on one point: that the book market remains informal.

Informality is their weapon, power over the state and dictate over writers.

They have turned chaos into the norm, disorder into order, and the darkness of numbers into a lampshade with which they put writers to sleep.

A few days ago I was forced to publicly accuse a former publisher of theft.

The pressure naturally took effect, and after two days she reversed the figures she had reported to me and corrected them not once, not twice, but ten times.

So he admitted that he had stolen from me ten times.

And since I complained that the book sales system allows publishers to steal from writers, the deputies questioned the publishers in the open session.

As I expected, one of them, with the assurance of a superior, not only the chief of the publishers but also the chief of the writers themselves, said that the issue of theft is not an issue at all since this is resolved by contract. Ben Blush

In short, the publisher said that any writer can check the warehouses, count the circulations, stand guard at the printing house, wait for the vans with books to leave, write letters to the tax authorities, then when all these efforts fail, make a round trip from Pristina to Saranda asking how many books have been sold.

Thus, with the publishers nodding their heads and the deputies bowing their heads, this conversation ended and no improvements were made to the book law.

Unfortunately, no one asked what happens in France, Italy, Slovenia, or Finland, where publishers and writers do not accuse each other of theft, because their healthy relationship is guaranteed by the state.

There was no talk at all about formalizing the market because this topic does not interest publishers, and no one said that every book sold without a fiscal invoice has two winners and two losers.

Every time a book is sold without a receipt, two people have stolen two others.

The publisher and the seller have stolen from the author and the state.

It's that simple.

If I were at that session, I would ask just one question to the MPs who were confused by the publishers' antics and treated writers like vegetable growers who have mixed up chemical fertilizer.

Do they know who Naim Frashëri's publisher was?

What about the publisher of De Rada?

Who was the publisher of Migjen?

Nobody knows and there's no need to know.

Their publishers have been covered in dust by time.

People read writers along with their books.

When a writer writes poorly, it is neither the state nor the publisher's fault, but the writer himself.

There are writers without publishers, but there can be no publishers without writers.

Homer had no publisher and perhaps that is why he withstood the test of time.

But unfortunately, a syndicate of publishers has been created in Albania that has more rights than writers.

They appear on television from breakfast to dinner, they talk about writers, they are critics, tacticians, technicians, salesmen, printers, connectors, solvers, marketers and policemen.

They are asked when laws change, they are asked how much to charge for the book, they care about what the book center will be like, how much money will be spent there, who will receive it, they give grades, set quotas, assessments, speeches, and they judge writers.

They are merchants who act like owners and blame writers for not selling more books.

For the sake of truth, Albanian writers do not write worse than Greek, Serbian or Macedonian writers, but they sell much worse than them.

Albanian publishers know how to sell, but they don't know how to market, which means they don't even know how to sell.

Times have changed. What used to be sold is now marketed.

But that part of the cost of a book that should go to marketing, publishers use to appear on television themselves, and thus they don't sell the writers but their opinions.

They treat the relationship with the writer as a commercial relationship when it should not and cannot be that way.

Whether we like it or not, the Albania we have today is not the product of merchants but of writers.

The Renaissance that created this country from poetry was not a commercial activity, but a cultural activity that later became political.

So Albania owes an even greater debt to writers.

If within this damn week I hadn't caught my former publisher red-handed stealing from me and if a couple of other publishers, who are my friends, hadn't slandered me by speaking so badly about writers, I wouldn't have gotten into this tunnel of narrow interests.

But since I'm used to arguing with both MPs and publishers, I have to say something about both sides.

The book issue in Albania is not a commercial problem.

The book issue is a national problem.

When someone seeks to cure a pandemic, they talk to doctors and scientists, not drug dealers.

That's how the book works today.

Albania is facing a pandemic.

This pandemic is called ignorance.

According to official statistics, we are the last country in Europe for book reading, the last in Europe for bookstores per capita, we are a country where 80 percent of people admit that they have not read a single book in the last five years.

We are practically the most ignorant country in Europe right now.

And if bodily diseases are cured with medicine, ignorance, which is the disease of a society's ills, is cured only by reading.

With books.

Therefore, the book issue should not be treated as a publisher's trickery but as a crisis of national proportions.

Since I know the publishers very well, just as I know the MPs very well, I know just as well where the grafting of these two races ends.

Usually nowhere.

There comes a day when they behave the same and do the only thing they know how to do: talk a lot without saying anything.

I once had a publisher who, after selling 30 copies of just one of my books, as if to put a cherry on the cake of honor I had made for him, asked me to make him an MP.

I did it and that day I went crazy.

This story reminded me of when I saw the session about the book in parliament.

The publishers tried to drive the MPs crazy and almost succeeded.