FLASH
Shkruar nga Ben Blushi
In short, I wasn't upset because I was being robbed, but because the man who was stealing from me made no effort to convince me that he wasn't stealing from me.
I wouldn't have gotten into the jungle of selling books if the publisher I had until a few months ago hadn't stolen from me in a spectacular and very stupid way.
More than the insult I felt when I received her annual report, I was irritated by the total lack of care she showed when she stole from me.
In short, I wasn't upset because I was being robbed, but because the man who was stealing from me made no effort to convince me that he wasn't stealing from me.
But this ugly and disgusting relationship does not arise only from the deformed character of my publisher, who has a plastic piggy bank name, but from an Albanian anomaly.
The law gives her the opportunity to steal.
And she does it without worrying at all that I might catch her, as long as the law doesn't catch her.
Happy to have stolen an author, she squeezes silicone from a writer's fat, in a country of two million inhabitants, 80 percent of whom have not read a single book in five years, according to official statistics.
With these dimensions, the theft of fat becomes even more tragic.
But the theft that publishers commit from writers has a major ally. That is the state.
In the almost twenty years I've been publishing, I've known several publishers and, despite having written contracts with all of them, I've based my relationship with them mainly on trust.
On some occasions my publishers have been delusional, on other occasions chaotic, on other occasions both chaotic and delusional, but this behavior, which has harmed both parties equally, has never led me to suspect that any of them are stealing from me.
Even today, I don't believe they stole from me, although if they wanted to, they could, because the state allows them to.
A good peasant selling potatoes or a lonely horseshoe maker knows in every case how much goods he produces and how much he sells.
He measures potatoes by the pound, while horseshoes can never be more than the village horses.
But a book cannot be measured in pounds, and the author never knows how many have been printed or how many have been sold.
I hear dozens of complaints every day from various writers whose relationship with publishers resembles a salty dish of tears.
The more the book market shrinks, the more ruthless publishers become, even when they happen to be much better men or women than the plastic piggy bank that fell into my hands.
But unfortunately, even the new book law, which is being discussed in parliament, does not protect the author and does not give him any opportunity to defend himself.
Even when you are sure that you have been stolen, you cannot collect any evidence that you have been stolen, because the infrastructure of the book is missing.
There is no place to sell books today, because bookstores have disappeared.
Albania is last on the reading list of European countries and also on the list of bookstores per capita.
There are no more than five bookstores in the entire country that only sell books and not soda pop, Coca-Cola, Fanta, beach balls, and umbrellas.
Apart from Tirana, which has only one modern bookstore, in large cities like Korça, Elbasan, Shkodra, Vlora, and Fier, the bookstores where books were once sold are a memory of people over 60.
From Vlora to Saranda, where about 1 million people vacation, there is not a single bookstore.
Saying that Albanians don't read is unfair, but saying that they are prevented from reading is very true.
The lack of bookstores has turned the Book Fair into a large store where people come once a year and buy books in bulk.
It is understood there how much Albanians suffer to find a book.
In small towns, buying a book is torture. The book never goes there.
Under these conditions, publishers sell less and less every day and, naturally, to compensate for their losses, they shift the burden to the weakest vertebra: the writer.
No one believes it, but on the book's earnings list, the person who writes it earns less than everyone else.
Authors receive less than the state, than the seller, than the printer and publisher, and the writer carries all four pillars of the book industry on his back.
But when these four parties who make your life miserable by riding on you and stealing from you take turns, the torture becomes even more unbearable.
Of course, book law cannot regulate these commercial relationships, but it can do something else: protect authors from theft.
In Europe, this relationship is easily defended.
Like all goods sold in a supermarket, reading the process of selling a book at the bookstore's cash register is simultaneously reported to three parties: the state that collects the tax, the publisher, and the author.
So, such a simple fiscal move saves Albanian writers from riding plastic piggies who, to make life even more tasteless, appear on television every week talking about your books that they neither understand nor have they read.
This part is even more slanderous. To be stolen without being read.
It happened to me, but like me, to many other writers.
Although I have long had no desire to tell the government what to do or what not to do, I believe that this country owes a debt to its writers.
To save them from the piggies who are disfigured with silicone stolen from their flea fat.
Amund te hetohe po hetimi te fabrikes bukes te dridave uji qerane taksa aeroplane targeted veze gjiza mishi plehu epsti kondrabanta politikane zhjedhore shira ndertime shkolla private television private tik token rrjete social pedophilia. Ngaximi seksual jellies rrushfet
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