Russian publishers reportedly cut print runs after Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries warehouses, where their books are stored

Some Russian publishers have stopped printing new titles and are cutting print runs following Ukrainian drone strikes on Wildberries warehouses, two sources at major retail chains told the Russian business daily Kommersant.

Rosman general director Boris Kuznetsov confirmed the cuts. “The print runs we planned to sell to cover our costs went up in flames. So publishing houses really are cutting the number of new titles and projects that were supposed to come out,” he said.

Eksmo-AST said it’s seeing a “slight decline” in its release plans for this August compared with last August, and plans to adjust further based on demand and the capacity of “distribution channels,” particularly Wildberries.

Publisher Alpina said it now more often opts for smaller print runs on reprints “to optimize warehouse storage,” but has no plans to halt the release of new titles.

A source at one of the companies told Kommersant that storing products in marketplace warehouses is “now dangerous,” but “not all publishers have space to store all their print runs.”

In early August, Kommersant reported that Russian book publishers were suspending sales on Wildberries amid the Ukrainian drone strikes on the marketplace’s warehouses. Wildberries said at the time that it “was not seeing publishers leave the platform.”

The Russian Book Union, the Association of Book Publishers of Russia, and the Association of Book Distributors calculated that more than 11 million books burned in the Wildberries warehouses Ukraine attacked, most of them fiction, children’s literature, and popular science titles.

Ukraine has regularly struck Wildberries’ largest warehouses across Russia since mid-July, and damage to the marketplace and its sellers has already been estimated at hundreds of billions of rubles.