The volumes of Nexus or Sapiens, or the biography of Michelle Obama - the wife of the former US head of state - that are exhibited in the Bookchef publishing house could be considered a rarity despite the fact that they have sold millions throughout the world.
Not because the translation of these works into Ukrainian has not found an echo among local readers, but because of a more unusual fact: all the copies that the company had burned this summer, in separate Russian drone (UAV) attacks.
"We have lost 900,000 books (of all kinds). All our stock. We have only been able to send about 100 copies of Nexus and Sapiens to Lviv because we have had to reprint our entire catalog in less than a month," says Yevhen Shyrynos, director of the kyiv-based company.
At any fair in this sector, authors and firms in the field would be discussing the number of works published, but among the participants of the Lviv International Book Forum (known as BookForum), the most general discussion is about the number of texts they have lost.
The writer Andriy Kokotyukha, author of dozens of detective novels and others dedicated to the children's market, does not even know how many of his creations have disappeared.
"The publishing house that published my works was burned down and with it my books. I don't know how many. It may have been 50, 100 or 1,000. My children's books and titles like Gimnasta or La Mano Negra, which are part of the seventh grade curriculum, were burned," he explained during the meeting.
Kokotyukha is part of the dozen authors who have gathered since the 10th in this city in western Ukraine to attend the well-known Literature Forum, which this year is held under the shadow of the unique air offensive that Moscow has launched against local printing presses and publishers, which a local media has defined as a new attempt to "murder Ukrainian culture."
During this past summer, Moscow's UAVs and missiles have attacked publishing houses, printing presses and book warehouses in Ukraine on more than 20 occasions. On July 2, nearly 800,000 texts burned in a terrible bonfire caused by a Russian drone. Another 250,000 suffered the same end on July 19.
The offensive intensified in August and on the first day of that month two of these unmanned devices destroyed a warehouse in Kharkiv that housed 8 million written volumes. On August 16, another similar device destroyed the Pochaina book market in kyiv, one of the largest in this nation.
For Oleksandr Krasovytskyi of the Folio firm, which bills itself as the oldest private publishing house in Ukraine, "the enemy has the publishing houses in its sights. Unfortunately, in general terms, we can talk about between 15 and 16 million lost books. It is evident that most publishing houses completely lack funds to continue their activity, simply because they have nothing to sell."
According to the Pravda Ukraine newspaper, among the losses are 9 percent of the school textbooks that were supposed to be used by Ukrainian students who have already returned to school. At a recent meeting of this branch in Kharkiv - a city that is considered the "capital" of the Ukrainian printing industry - in the north of the country, the head of Culture, Tetiana Berezhna, estimated that the losses of local printing presses due to Russian bombings exceed 1.2 billion hryvnias (about 23 million euros).
"Russia is deliberately attacking our culture, our books, trying to erase our identity and us as a nation," the deputy prime minister also claimed. Present at one of the Lviv conferences, which discussed precisely what was defined as "Bookcide", the analyst Yevhen Hlibovytskyi opined that the Russian intentionality - Moscow is also hitting many other sectors of the local economy - "is irrelevant, because the result is that they have caused a deep crisis in Ukrainian culture."
BookChef's Yevhen Shyrynos admits the situation is "critical." "This year the volume of texts that will be printed in Ukraine will suffer a drop of between 10 and 15 percent. For next year we estimate that between 20 and 30 percent of publishing houses will be forced to close," he argues.
In force since 1994, BookForum became not only the largest publishing fair in the country, but also one of the most significant in Eastern Europe. Before the start of the war in 2014, tens of thousands of people attended this call.
This year the cultural event has brought together nearly 90 publishers and dozens of writers and intellectuals from more than half a dozen countries, who have animated nearly 300 conferences, debates, presentations of new titles or poetry readings for four days, challenging the escalation of violence sponsored by Moscow.
The war has permeated the entire social fabric of this country and BookForum has been no exception. Next to the publishers' sales centers you could find booths from different military units, which took advantage of the opportunity to try to recruit volunteers.
The same call dedicated a space to what it called "military literature", works written by uniformed men on the battle front. The figure of the well-known writer and singer Serhiy Zhadan, one of the most popular intellectuals in the country, who enlisted as a combatant in 2024, adorned several of the stands present in the main center of the convention.
The serious crisis generated by the Russian air attack has added to the stagnation already registered by Ukrainian publishers, who agree that the sales euphoria that was recorded in recent years has ended thanks to the growing local interest in texts in the Ukrainian language.
Russia's general offensive in 2022 was the main driver of the cultural change that this country has experienced since then. If Vladimir Putin's objective was to influence the symbiosis of both nations, the military attack has had a radically opposite effect, which has been transferred to the use of the local language and literary production.
A survey released during the Lviv meeting confirmed that 66% of Ukrainians now use the national language to communicate compared to 7% who still use Russian. Before 2014, they were more than 30%. The decline of that language accelerated in 2022, when 15 percent of Ukrainian citizens still used Russian as their main language.
In this spirit, President Volodymyr Zelensky ratified in 2023 the parliamentary decision to end the printing of books in Russian. Millions of texts in that language were removed from bookstores in a widespread effort that spread throughout the local geography.
"The Ukrainian book quickly filled the void left by Russian domination: dozens of new publishers and authors emerged, as well as thousands of titles in Ukrainian that had not previously been published," but that situation "has come to an end," Oleksiy Erinchak, founder of kyiv's main bookstore, Sens, told local media.
"At the beginning of 2025, sales stopped showing significant growth and competition intensified," he added. According to Hanna Bulhakova, from the Ranok publishing house, "the Russians have had some success in damaging our culture (with these bombings), but we also thought it was impossible to stop speaking Russian and we have succeeded."
