Training – Ukrainian Book Trade Project 2005 – 2008

In the course of the Ukrainian project, 41 seminars provided by Polish, Dutch, and German book trade experts were organised across the country for publishers, booksellers, and distributors, followed by consultations for individual companies on request.

Apart from the regular project training courses in Lviv, Kiev, and Charkov which were open to all book trade professionals, special workshops for booksellers were conducted by the retired director of the Dutch Athenaeum bookstore and honorary Board member of the Dutch Association of Booksellers, Guus Schut, in Chernivtsi, Dniepropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kherson, Khmelnitsky, Lviv, Mykolayiv, Odessa, Rivne, Simferopol, Vinnytsa, and Zaporizhia with the support of the regional distribution centres. The text was published in Ukrainian to make it available to other booksellers, too. Moreover, during the largest annual book fair “Publishers Forum” in Lviv he gave a presentation about book trade policy, and the director of the Dutch Foundation for the Collective Promotion of the Book (CPNB), Henk Kraima, discussed the joint promotion activities of Dutch publishers, booksellers, and libraries.

Training visits to The Netherlands

In April 2007, CEEBP organized an intensive training course in The Netherlands for ten distribution managers together with the local project coordinators under the guidance of Guus Schut, the former director of the renowned academic and literary Athenaeum bookshop. The course included: a seminar on bookshop management and cooperation within the book chain by the latter; visits to a variety of specialized as well as general bookshops in and outside Amsterdam, covering the whole range from small specialized bookstores to universal megastores; a lecture by the current director of the Athenaeum bookshop, about the history of his bookstore and the Dutch book market, bookselling as an economically-based cultural activity, and the importance of the cultural function of bookstores in society;

a lecture by the director of a publishing house; and a guided tour of the Central Book House nation-wide distribution centre, conducted by its director.

The distributors’ visit to The Netherlands supplemented the regular project training courses and was designed as trainers training aimed at the transfer of knowledge and skills to local booksellers in Ukrainian regions.

A year later, in April 2008, a second group of Ukrainian regional distribution managers visited The Netherlands for a course by the former director of the Athenaeum bookshop. The course included his workshop on “What a distributor should know about bookselling”; a seminar on cooperation within the book trade, entitled “The cake becomes larger when you bake it together”, with the former head of the Dutch Book Trade Association Training Centre VOB; an introduction by the director of the new Amsterdam City Library, about the public library and the Library Service Centre (NBD / Biblion); a tour of a variety of specialized as well as general bookshops in and outside Amsterdam, with a lecture by the current director of the Athenaeum bookshop, and a visit to the exhibition at the University Library at Oude Turfmarkt: “Boek zoekt lezer” (Books Search for Readers) about the history of Dutch book promotion.