American Books in Soviet Publishing

Abstract

Among the things the Russians like to boast about is publishing. Their presses are now producing about 64,000 books (in over a billion copies), nearly 640 million copies of magazines, and nearly 13 billion copies of newspapers each year. Although they define a book as any publication five pages or more in length and their average newspaper consists of four pages or less, the figures are still impressive. Most of their books do contain far more than five pages, their magazines seem to contain, on the average, as much textual material as those outside Russia, and their newspapers are almost devoid of advertisements and many of the other space fillers that make American newspapers so bulky. What the text of the Soviet newspapers has to do with the day's news is, of course, another matter.