The Business of Literature in Hungary

The market itself is pretty small, and all the players are pretty well known. There are only a few shops, so I think so far we have been able to live in peace. In about 2005 some figures were published by the Hungarian Publishers Association, which represents the big chains who cover about 60-70% of the domestic market. Of the 65 billion forint overall industry, about 4 billion are non-Hungarian books, which is about 8%. Within that, the majority are textbooks. The language breakdown is similar to the ability of Hungarians to speak various foreign languages. So, about 70% can speak English, 20% German, and the last 10-15% can speak Spanish, Italian, French and so on.

I saw a shocking figure recently, about the second-language ability of citizens in 25 European countries. Hungary was the second-worst, trailed only by England. In a more-connected world and ever-increasing internet penetration and use, it is vital for Hungary to improve its ability to speak other languages.

Choosing a bookstore is a little like choosing a dentist – you want to create a sort of relationship, where you feel comfortable, especially if for whatever reason you spend a significant portion of your income on books. We don’t try to step on the toes of the other booksellers in Hungary, but try to gain those new customers that might be emerging, such as the students or the foreigners moving to Hungary.

There is one, Corvina. Since we’ve joined the E.U., there has been much more money available to fund the translation of Hungarian works into foreign languages. Some of the great 20^th century modern classics, such as Kostolányi or József Attila, are just coming into the public domain, which means they are free to be translated and sold. However, only about 2% of the English language book market is made up of translations. The rest is native language.

I think you should read 20^th century Hungarian fiction. Poetry has been marginal. Antal Szerb, Szabó Magda, Kertész Imre because of his Nobel Prize, Kostolányi, Nádas Péter, Eszterházy.

In the Western countries, book publishers sell their books to distributors, who resell them to retailers, with everyone taking their percentage. Here, unfortunately, publishers tend to put their books into the hands of retailers on a sort of consignment basis. This means that the retailer only really owns a small percentage of their books, say 5%, and it’s very hard for them to balance their costs and purchases. Here, we own all the books; they’re ours. This gives us much more incentive to sell – it’s our money – but it also gives us more flexibility with pricing and sales on old stock.

Harry Potter, incidentally, is in a class of its own. We had a party here when the last one came out, and had hundreds of people here. It was great.

I read a book by Jason Epstein, who spent 70 years in the publishing industry and critiques it in Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future, about the whole situation, what’s happening now. The process, as he sees it, is that the distance between the author and the reader is too great. It starts with the author, a publisher, a wholesaler, a distributor, a bookshop and finally gets to the reader. It’s a business of billions of dollars, and several industries have to live out of it. In the present system it might take years between when an author finishes a book and it arrives in stores, due to the publisher’s control and the process I mentioned before.

His vision is to make the process much shorter. The digital version of the book would be available through the web. If you like it, you walk into an automatic bookshop, select the title on a PC, put in your credit card and in two or three minutes you have a printed and bound paperback copy. The ball lies with the publishers – do they want to start this process or be left behind by it? In a reasonable time, I think we have to move towards this way, which will not mean the end of the book business or the bookshop, but it will mean a dramatic drop in prices, not to mention the environmental savings due to less packaging and shipping. Most of all, it will mean a closer distance between the writer and the reader.

Another emerging idea is for an author to write their books online, and allow readers to follow along and make comments. Perhaps she would decide to change things based on the comments.

We started in 2003, a bit by accident. My wife loves Agatha Christie novels, and especially liked collecting them in the original versions. She has over 70 books, which of course cost a bit of money. As we were a bit of a cosmopolitan family, we were traveling throughout Europe often, and found that the books were cheaper in other countries than here. So we realized we could make a bit of money selling foreign language books here. I myself have over 12 years training and experience in logistics, so figuring out how to balance the cost of transportation vs. the price of the books became my job. Of course, the less you spend on logistics in any import situation, the more you can share with your customers.

The first year we spent testing the market, keeping our day jobs and so on. But in February of 2005 we opened our shop, so that’s a good indicator of our success. Before that we sold books only via the internet. We started with just a few thousand titles, and at our most recent check we have over 32,000 books on our shelves. This is really the most significant difference between us and other Hungarian booksellers. I dare say we have by far the biggest stock of non-Hungarian language books in the country.

We have four channels of sales: the shop itself, the internet shop, a small wholesale and distribution operation, and an activity we call the road show. About 150 days a year I or an associate takes a small van with 1,200-1,500 books and visit for example the many different universities throughout Hungary and even Transylvania and Slovakia and sell the requested readings that are needed by the students for their classes. As we offer a range of qualities, from new to remainder and secondhand, people can choose how much they want to pay.

Selling books on the internet is different than other merchants. People do a lot of their research on the internet, and they want to make their orders there, so if they can check on availabilities from home and get their books delivered to their homes it is much better.

There is one example that I liken to our strategy. When Tesco arrived in the 1990s people were so happy to have such a variety of mass-produced items at good prices. It was a big step up from what came before it. But now they’ve gotten tired of mass-production, cheap quality and also that the sellers aren’t really experts in food. The answer is Culinaris, a store that offers higher-quality foods and a company run by food-lovers, who know about food. That is our place as well, offering a higher-quality selection of books from people who really know about them, who can recommend things from a knowledgeable perspective. We don’t use the post anymore, only courier services, as they are more traceable and reliable.