(opinion essay)

On April 24, students of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University had a wonderful opportunity to attend a lecture by Mykyta Mazur. It was nice to listen and talk about current topics that most of us were interested in. For example, about the scandal with Spartak Subota or the scandal with the General Director of the Yakaboo bookstore, Ivan Bohdan, for his sexist remarks.

First of all, we were told about Ukrainian publishing houses, which stopped their work after the full-scale Russian invasion, and publishing houses, which, on the contrary, continued their work in such a difficult time and even expanded their production in different parts of Ukraine.

Mykyta Mazur said that before the full-scale war, more than 80% of all editions of Ukrainian-made books were printed in Kharkiv; the largest share was produced by the Unisoft printing house.

Before the full-scale war, the printing house produced 1.2-1.3 million units of various products every month, approximately 800-900 thousand hardcover books.

“According to the results of March 2023, we produced 1.06 million books, including almost 650,000 in hardcover,” affirmed Head of the printing house Oleksandr Popovych.

We were also told about the importance of high-quality printing and high-quality illustrations, and they gave us an example that thanks to the illustrations from “Mavka” the sales of “Forest Song” increased 300 times. And “Stary Lev Publishing House” was recognized as the best children’s publishing house in Europe.

Mykyta`s analysis affirmed that book sales (take Yakaboo as an example) amounted to about 2.2 million books sold per year on this platform and, thanks to the “every thousand,” the book sales unexpectedly increased in Ukraine.

Mykyta Mazur prepared well for his lecture and it was clear how he wanted to find a common language with the students and he succeeded in this perfectly. For example, we were looking for how to replace the well-known slang word of a foreign origin “kring” with a Ukrainian word.

At the end of the lecture, the students had the opportunity to chat with Mykyta, ask various questions and receive clear answers to them. He recommended books, movies and simply tried to be a friend for students with whom you could talk about everything in the world.

So, this spring lecture left a deep mark in our memories…