MOSCOW, October 11 The number of bookstores in Russia fell by a third during the period from January 2020 to October 2023, the number of publishing houses also decreased by 16%, it was calculated for analytics of the «Contour.Focus» service.
It is clarified that during this time the number of liquidations was 4 times higher than the number of registrations: about 4 thousand stores left the market, and less than a thousand opened businesses.
«Experts … studied the dynamics of the Russian book business from January 2020 to October 2023. During this time, the number of bookstores fell from 8.3 thousand to 5.3 thousand. The most closures occurred in 2020-2021: at this time, monthly closures about a hundred companies. And in December 2020-January 2021, 482 organizations left the market at once,» the study says.
Thus, the largest number of bookstores as of October 2023 are located in Moscow, the Moscow region and St. Petersburg. In the capital, more than 500 companies are engaged in this business, in the Moscow region and St. Petersburg — about 300. The Krasnodar Territory (238 stores) and the Sverdlovsk Region (192) close the top. At the same time, such facilities are opening most actively in the Donetsk region — now there are 35 of them there, while in January 2020 there were none.
In turn, the fewest such stores are in the Kherson region — one organization, the Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Tyva, where there are two each. There are slightly more bookstores in Baikonur and in the Zaporozhye region (3 and 4, respectively).
«During the period under review, from January 2020 to October 2023, the number of book publishing houses decreased from 4.7 thousand to 3.9 thousand. As for registrations and liquidations, closures were almost twice as high as openings: 1.8 thousand versus 989,” the study adds.