La circulation des livres dans l’espace post-yougoslave : territoires, politiques du livre et stratégies éditoriales

Abstract

After the violent break-up of the Yugoslav Federation in 1991 and the end of the socialist regime, the professional book industry was reorganised within the new state and national borders, both in the former Serbo-Croatian language zone and in the Slovenian, Macedonian and Albanian-speaking territories. The large public companies combining publishing, printing and distribution activities have given way to a multitude of more or less permanent private players. Yugoslavia’s successor states have attempted to redefine book distribution channels and forms of legitimacy within the new borders. However, from the early 2000s onwards, the narrowness of markets, linguistic and cultural proximity and new post-Yugoslav cooperation encouraged publishers, authors, and distributors to expand their distribution territories, despite material and political difficulties. Furthermore, bibliographic information is an area where cooperation has proved necessary, both to manage heritage collections and to document recent releases. This article looks at several examples of the tensions between the assertion of a national –and often linguistic– territory of book production/distribution and phenomena that escape or contradict it.