Russia’s leading digital publishing platform removes thousands of book titles from sale

LitRes, one of Russia’s largest digital publishing platforms, has made approximately 4,500 of its titles unavailable to Russian customers amid fears that it could be fined for promoting the use of drugs, the company’s general director Sergey Anuryev told Russian business daily Kommersant on Thursday.

Describing the move as a precautionary measure, Anuryev said that on top of the books LitRes had withdrawn from sale, it had also flagged a further approximately 400 other titles that could potentially fall foul of a new Russian law that prohibits the promotion of drug use and the sharing of information about drugs.

Though he said that LitRes had preemptively withdrawn many titles from sale that did not directly break the law, Anuryev said he wasn’t expecting publishers in Russia to face a “wave of fines” relating to the promotion of drug use. 

Noting the many new restrictions on sales in recent years, Anuryev said “the most tragic thing” was that while services such as his followed the law, books by foreign agents and other restricted content “were still available illegally”.

Founded in 2005, LitRes has over 12 million monthly users and is the leading digital publishing platform in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with a catalogue that contains over 875,000 eBooks and audiobooks in multiple languages. 

The new law, which was initially due to come into force in Russia on 1 September, but was subsequently postponed until 1 March, introduces fines ranging from €20 to over €6,000 for promoting the use of illegal drugs, with anybody breaking the law twice in one year being liable for criminal charges.

Before the law came into force, music labels and streaming services began to send artists a notification asking them to delete or re-record tracks mentioning drugs, Kommersant wrote in August. 

In October, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that, at the request of the authorities, almost 80 tracks by popular artists had been removed from various music platforms operating in Russia over the past two years, mainly due to drug references or political statements.