Återspeglas förlagens positioner på bokmarknaden i litteraturstödsfördelningen? : en analys med utgångspunkt i 2011 års Litteraturutredning

Sammanfattning: In March 2011 the Swedish government appointed a committee to investigate and analyze the literature’s situation and the literature area. The committee will not investigate the conditions and positions of the actors on the book market, nor analyze the distribution of the National Arts Council’s literature support – a support with the purpose to encourage publication of quality literature with great diversity. This despite that the literature support has been frequently criticized for being an unbalanced grant that promotes the already big publishing houses on the expense of the smaller one’s. The purpose was to examine if the competition problems on the Swedish book market are mirrored in the distribution of the literature support. We have investigated the National Arts Council’s application lists for five of Sweden’s biggest and six small-and-medium-sized publishing houses from 2006-2010. Our findings show that larger publishing houses are receiving greater grants than smaller publishing houses. Since distribution is one of the biggest economical problems for smaller publishing houses we suggest that the distribution support (today included in the literature support) should be separated and granted in correlation to the turnover of the publishing houses; giving smaller grants to houses with higher turnover thus making competition somewhat more even.