Authors

Discussion

Do you measure a book by the number of pages or illustrations? Or the quality of the paper? Or the number of hours you will need to finish reading the book? In post-Soviet Russia, where the market economy determines book prices and the commodification of reading is now common, the expectations and demands of Russian readers are still shaped by Soviet book culture, and at the same time affected by new realities. The book played a very important role in the Soviet society, where it was both a fetishised and sacred object. Certain shifts in the attitudes to the book, which could be ‘traced back to an idealised philosophical concept of the book’ (Pristed, 2017), are visible in online posts and discussions by Russian readers of one of the biggest online bookshops. In the times of decreasing family budgets and increasing book prices, what are Russian readers willing to pay for? This paper explores how Russian readers determine books’ value when they shop online and try to quantify it.