On 9 August 2026, Avi Shomer, CEO and co-owner of Tzomet Sfarim, Israel's largest bookstore chain, sent a letter to the country's publishers. From the coming quarter, every new title will require prior approval from the chain's purchasing managers, and every publisher will have to declare whether the book was funded by its author. The interesting thing about the letter is not the demand. It is the return address. The alarm was not raised by legislators, by the ministry of culture, or by the writers' association. It came from the till.
Shomer also diagnosed the problem exactly, in his own words: titles published without a professional and binding assessment process. And then he proposed that purchasing managers do the reading on behalf of the people who stopped reading. That is a declaration that manuscript assessment has failed, and that booksellers will replace it. How badly has it failed? I sent a poetry manuscript to six publishers and paid each of them a reading fee. Most did not bother to reply at all. I paid for judgement, did not receive it, and in the end published the book myself. It is hard to argue about the quality of an assessment process that does not trouble itself to read or to answer.
Credential or consequence
One question decides the fate of every book, and the entire industry follows from it: is the work asking for a credential, or for a consequence? A book that wants a credential is satisfied by its own existence as a bound object: the corporate monograph, the inflated business card of a professional authority, the groundwork for a political campaign, the status symbol that photographs well. A book that wants a consequence is written to meet a living mind on the other side and leave it different from how it was. The difference between them is not intention. It is timing: a credential is complete at the moment of printing. A consequence begins only at the moment of reading. A market that gave up on consequence and settled for selling handsome credentials on coated paper has stopped being a cultural industry and become a factory for ego.
Why Israel is the case worth watching
Israel is small enough to see the whole machine at once. Two chains hold something in the region of 85 per cent of retail, by industry estimates, which means a publisher does not have to persuade many booksellers. It has to persuade two purchasing departments. And once your customer is a buyer rather than a reader, the reader is not morally unnecessary. The reader is structurally unnecessary.
Compare the shape of a fragmented market. France has roughly 3,300 independent bookshops, holding about a quarter of the market under a fixed-price law that dates to 1981. Germany has around 6,000 under its own price-fixing regime. In the United States, 605 new independent bookshops opened in 2025 alone, and the American Booksellers Association's membership is close to triple what it was a decade ago. Those are not more virtuous markets. They are markets with more independent yeses in them, each one a small bet by somebody who knows their readers by name.
The numbers
An Israeli bestseller once meant fifty thousand copies sold to hungry readers. Today the threshold of success sits at around three thousand, and original titles from small houses sometimes sell in the low dozens. Against that fall, the presses put out more than seven thousand new printed titles a year, at a rate that answers to no demographic or cultural logic. The industry produces more books than ever and sells fewer than ever, and there is no mystery in it. It is the direct result of who is paying. The need of writers to speak overtook the need of readers to listen long ago, and whoever's need burns hotter is the one who opens their wallet.
The imprint reversed
An established publisher's mark on a cover was meant to signal a bet: a literary house putting its own money behind an unknown writer because it believed in the text. Today the meaning has flipped by a hundred and eighty degrees. The mark now testifies mainly that the writer bet on the publisher and paid a premium for the logo. The real production cost of an original title runs to a few tens of thousands of shekels, and the difference charged above that is not payment for editing or printing. It is the purchase of a reputation.
I know what it costs. Negotiating a non-fiction book, I was handed an extreme quote: 120,000 shekels plus VAT, and in return my name beneath an established logo, a thousand copies, and the rights to the book transferred to them. Full payment for branding, without even retaining the rights to my own book. I do not claim this is the going rate, but in its extremity it shows plainly where the system has drifted. And here is the funnel: the house publishes recognised names from the front rank without charging them a thing, in order to maintain a glittering shop window, and then sells that glitter at a high price to anonymous writers who fund the whole party out of pocket. The famous writer is the marketing expense. The anonymous writer is the revenue.
The shelf became a finish line
The moment a book leaves the press and lands on the shelf, the entire value chain has been satisfied and the event is over. The author has his credential, has photographed it for social media, and has bought himself the title. The editors, proofreaders, designers and publicists have been paid in full. The publisher cashed its cheque months before the book touched a shelf. The one party left on the wrong side of the finish line is the bookshop, the only player in the system that sees a shekel only when a real reader takes money out of their pocket. Its floor space and its warehouses have become free scenery for a private awards ceremony. Which is exactly where the letter came from.
Writing fell to zero, reading did not
In an era where a machine can produce three hundred polished pages in a few keystrokes, the act of writing has become cheap, abundant and free of any barrier to entry. The United States alone saw an estimated 3.5 million self-published titles in 2025, up by nearly two fifths in a single year; Amazon had already capped self-publishing at three books per author per day to slow the flood. The scarcest resource in culture is no longer the ability to write. It is the willingness of a living person to give ten hours of a finite life to reading closely. The book market ran from readers for exactly that reason: recruiting a writer willing to pay a fortune for recognition is astonishingly easy, and persuading a sceptical reader to spend ten hours on a book is punishing work. The industry chose the easy one and called it a business model.
The question nobody should have had to ask
Shomer asked publishers to declare who funded each book, and to those who heard it, the request sounded like an interrogation. But the serious problem is not the question. It is that the question had to be asked at all. In a functioning market, a book's funding source is not confidential intelligence that a buyer extracts from a supplier. It is printed on the book. English at least has words for the distinction, and bodies that police it: the IBPA's hybrid-publisher criteria, whose first principle is that a legitimate hybrid must be capable of rejecting a manuscript, and the Society of Authors' 2022 report into paid-for publishing. Hebrew has no such vocabulary at all, which is why any publisher in Israel can call itself anything.
Definition one: a trade publisher
A trade publisher pays the writer, aims solely at sales to readers, and does not take a single shekel from the author, not even a symbolic one. Nor from some of its authors. A mixed model is not a model. It is concealment. A house that charges anonymous writers and uses that money to maintain a shop window of recognised names is not a trade publisher with exceptions. It is selling status, and everything else is packaging.
Definition two: a production company
A production company is the inverse model, and it is entirely legitimate the moment it is called by its name. The writer pays, everyone knows the writer pays, and the brand stops being a promise about selection and becomes a promise about work. Its test is simple and measurable: from what state did it receive the manuscript, and to what state did it bring it. Full self-publishing, where the writer assembles their own team, sits in this category too and is exactly as legitimate. One rule cannot be waived: a production company takes no royalties on sales, because the author already funded the production. A small bonus, of the order of two to five per cent, creates a shared interest. Anything beyond that mostly serves to give the author the illusion that somebody here is aiming at sales.
And here is an advantage nobody discusses: a production company working under a declared subject or agenda gives the reader precisely what the generic imprint stopped giving, which is aligned expectations. Once a brand stops pretending to be a guarantee of objective quality, it can finally be an honest promise about kind. The reader knows in advance what sort of book they are entering, and anyone uninterested does not enter. On that basis I am building Storytelling as a production company for narrative-provoking books, so I have an obvious interest in everything written here.
Definition three: hybrid
The hottest argument in the world sits precisely in this box, which in Israel contains almost every publisher there is. The question is when a hybrid model is honest and when it is predatory, and I think the argument is unnecessary, because the rule is simple: if it charges writers money, it is not a trade publisher. One to one. And if it is hybrid, it is obliged to publish its model in full and in a uniform format: what it charges, for what, and at what rates. Without that, “hybrid” is merely the laundered name for the same mechanism, deceiving the reader about what the imprint means and exploiting the writer about what the deal is.
Three categories, with one uniform and transparent hybrid disclosure, would build fairness into the industry itself, so that no buyer at any bookstore chain would ever need to interrogate a publisher.
The measurement that is missing
The real repair begins on the day we stop counting copies pressed into warehouses and start measuring consequence: how many people opened the book, how many of them reached the last page, and what that reading made them go and do afterwards. These are not a technological fantasy. They exist, they run, they are measured page by page and paid for in real money everywhere but here. Amazon pays authors by pages actually read. Britain has calculated public lending payments from the loan data of every public library in the country since July 2025, while Israel still samples twenty libraries. Readers are the actual event, and the industry needs measures that put them back on the field.
Books, gentlemen, not covers
A person is entitled to publish a book as a status symbol, as a family keepsake, or as background material for a campaign, and there is nothing wrong with any of it, as long as it is said honestly and in full transparency. But when a book is intended from the outset to serve as a credential only, its words empty of meaning, and it turns from a human experience into a silent decorative object made to be photographed beside. A market that produces thousands of such objects a year is not cultivating a literature. It is running an industry of covers.
