The Bombora publishing house, part of the Eksmo-AST group, will publish a summary of Prince Harry's memoirs Spare as part of the CrossReads project, since the owner of the rights to the book, Penguin Random House, stopped working in Russia after the start of the war. This is reported by Kommersant.
As Eksmo-AST told the publication, the retelling without direct quotation will be released in the form of audio, electronic text and in print on February 16. At the same time, in other countries, the unabridged memoirs of the Duke of Sussex went on sale on January 10.
An audiobook and a text version of the summary have already appeared on the Litres website. As specified by the publishing house, the first print run of the book will be three thousand copies.
Screenshot of Litres website
“The summary will reflect the key ideas of the book without using excerpts from it: the author of the summary read the book in English and retold it in her own language. <…> We rely on the citation law,” Eksmo CEO Yevgeny Kapyev told Kommersant.
Smart Reading, a non-fiction summary service, will also sell its version of Spare. The chief editor of the project, Maria Kopachevskaya, drew attention to the relevance of the retellings and noted the growth of summaries for books in the service catalog “due to the current situation.”
Evgeny Selivanov, director of the content development department of the LitRes group of companies, explained the growing popularity of retellings by the lack of time among readers. At the same time, Kommersant's interlocutors noted that the «gray scheme» of publishing books could negatively affect relations with foreign copyright holders.
Spare became a world bestseller on the first day. Almost one and a half million copies of the book were sold in the UK in a day. In his memoir, Prince Harry spoke in detail about the conflict with his family, in particular with his brother, because of his marriage to actress Meghan Markle. The Duke of Sussex also recalled his first sexual relationship and the experience of drug use.
Earlier, due to the refusal of foreign film studios to work on the Russian market, films began to be shown without distribution certificates in the country. So, during the New Year holidays, the second part of James Cameron's film «Avtar: The Way of the Water» was released in cinemas.
In the «Formula Kino» and «Cinema Park» they said that domestic films are not enough to achieve the previous indicators . After that, the audience began to sell tickets for «film products» — a mixture of Russian and foreign cinema.