Oleg Novikov, president of the publishing group Eksmo-AST, said the company refused to publish several dozen books that failed checks for compliance with Russian law. His interview appeared in Forbes and was flagged by the outlet Agentstvo.
Novikov said the company has no exact statistics. He said Eksmo-AST conducted about 20,000 internal reviews of works using artificial intelligence and commissioned roughly 600 external checks. In the end, there remained "several dozen books that for some reason could not be finalized, or the author refused to do it, or foreign rights holders did not agree with us."
Novikov stressed that in the absence of clear criteria, publishers "have to over-insure," especially after criminal cases against employees of the publishers Popcorn Books and Individuum. He said that after those cases, Eksmo-AST "drew all the necessary conclusions" and "seriously tightened" internal regulations, and also fired some employees who refused to comply with the new censorship requirements.
The head of the publishing group said books are checked against ten criteria, including "LGBT propaganda," "drug propaganda," "extremism," "discrediting the armed forces," and "absence of foreign agents." The AI system, he said, sometimes gives strange recommendations: for example, it may associate the surname Dragunsky with drugs, and such remarks must be reviewed manually by an editor.
Novikov also mentioned the criminal case against the writer Boris Akunin: within its framework, all his books were seized and sealed — several tens of thousands of copies that are currently impossible to buy. In his view, writers who "deliberately left" dealt a blow to their own work, turned out to be unclaimed abroad, and lost touch with the reading audience in Russia.