A new Board has been elected. Book fair in which there is no publisher, reported Nova.rs.
The Book Fair did not announce this - the website has a Board that has not been functioning since last fall, neither is the Belgrade Fair, and it is not written in any of this year's issues of the Official Gazette, which publishes all the decisions of the Belgrade City Assembly.
The Association of Publishers and Booksellers of Serbia (UIKS) announced the new Board of the Book Fair, reacting to the fact that there are no publishers in the new convocation.
Members of the new Board
The president of the new Board of the Book Fair is Nikola Banković, acting general director of the Belgrade Fair, and the members are Miodrag Ivanović from the Ministry of Culture, Nenad Milenković, Maja Radonić, manager of the Ivo Andrić Foundation, and Jelena Gajić.
There is not a single publisher among them, as was the case until now. Let's remind you, in the previous convocation it was Vladislav Bajac and Žarko Čigoja. Publishers were a mandatory part of the Board of the Book Fair until the SNS came to power. That practice was re-established in 2019 after an agreement between Goran Vesić and the publisher, only to be discontinued again.
It is not a legal obligation.
Jelena Medaković, Belgrade's secretary of culture, tells "Vreme" that the Board was elected "at the last meeting of the City Assembly".
He explains that "the number of members has been reduced due to easier functioning and easier organization." Let's remind you, there were eight members before.
"It is not a legal obligation for publishers to be part of the Board, and they can certainly participate in the work even if they are not formally on the Board, through direct communication and initiative. Not a single initiative will be ignored," says Jelena Medaković.
Underestimating the publisher
The Association of Publishers and Booksellers of Serbia points out that "publishers were not officially informed of this decision, nor was the publishing community provided with any explanation, which is why representatives of the profession were completely left out of the body, which, by its nature and importance, should include those who form the basis and content of this manifestation."
"The exclusion of publishers from the Board not only underestimates the role and contribution of the publishing community, but also opens up a serious question of how decisions are made about the future of the most important literary event in the country," said the association.
They demand a review of this decision, and announce that "if this does not happen, we will be forced to seriously reconsider the position we will represent as representatives of publishers and to invite members of the publishing community to consider their presence at the Belgrade Book Fair."
By the way, the Association of Publishers and Booksellers is, unlike its colleagues from the Association of Professional Publishers, participated in the last Book Fair and thereby enabled his survival. Therefore, they consider the decision of the City Assembly to reduce the number of members of the Board to the detriment of publishers to be underestimating.
Kovacevic and Bajac
The president of the last convocation of the Book Fair Committee was academician Duško Kovačević. After being elected last summer the new management of the Belgrade Fair, after the dismissal of the general director Thank you Selic to that function appointed Nikola Banković, Duško Kovačević resigned.
The new management of the Belgrade Fair, led by Nikola Banković, did not accept the publisher's demands: to move the date of the Book Fair so that it would not fall on November 1, the anniversary of the victims of Novi Sad, and a modest reduction in the lease of the fair space. Because of that decision, Vladislav Bajac, the founder and editor-in-chief of the publishing house "Geopoetika", resigned from his membership in the Board of the Book Fair.
Therefore, according to the new decision of the City Assembly, Nikola Banković will decide on the International Book Fair in Belgrade in the future.
