Belgrade Book Fair Set, Exhibitors Are Pulling Out
The board of Serbia's publishers and booksellers association has recommended members skip the 69th Belgrade Book Fair. Ten houses have already withdrawn, and the deadline to decide is August 20.
The organizer’s official announcement still says everything is on track: dates of October 23 to 31, halls 1, 1A, 2A and 4, Tunisia as guest of honor. What is missing is the one thing that fills those halls. Publishers are withdrawing from the 69th Belgrade Book Fair one by one, and they are doing it in writing.
The Managing Board of the Serbian Publishers and Booksellers Association (UIKS), which brings together about 140 members, met on August 6 and recommended that member houses pull out of the Fair. At that same session, ten publishing houses announced they had already made the call:
- Laguna and Delfi
- Kreativni centar and Čarobna knjiga
- Partenon, Pčelica and Dereta
- Finesa, IPC Media and Kontrast
The remaining members have until August 20, when the deadline for registering exhibitors expires. Until then the Fair formally exists, since it has not been cancelled, but the real negotiation is over something else: who will actually be left to exhibit.
Why Are Publishers Pulling Out of the Book Fair?
The conflict did not start this summer. In March, the Belgrade City Assembly elected a new Book Fair board that included not a single publisher representative, meaning none of the people who pay for a stand, bring in authors and fill the halls with titles. The association sent a letter demanding that publishers be included on the board.
“We never received a reply to that letter,” the minutes of the UIKS Managing Board session state.
May brought an offer that, judging by how things turned out, made matters worse. Publisher representatives were offered observer seats with no voting rights, and they turned it down. There was no further contact with the organizers after that.
Belgrade’s city secretary for culture, Jelena Medaković, has taken the position that “it is not a legal obligation for publishers to be part of the Board” and that they can take part through direct communication and their own initiatives instead. Legally, that holds up. In practice, it leaves a publisher choosing between the role of a guest who makes suggestions and the role of a tenant who pays rent, and the Book Fair has not run on either of those two relationships for seven decades.
The Numbers Behind the Decision
The last edition already showed what happens when the relationship between the organizer and the industry breaks down. According to the organizer’s own figures, 203,350 visitors passed through the halls in 2024, and 134,750 in 2025. That is a drop of 34 percent in a single season, at an event that had been the country’s best attended cultural gathering for decades.
Publishers read that number as a business figure, not a cultural symptom. The minutes of the August session spell out the reasoning behind the decision in plain accounting terms:
“Because of all these problems, the number of Book Fair visitors was significantly reduced last year, and since a continuation of that trend can be expected this year as well, that is an additional reason for many publishers to reconsider their participation. The additional rise in costs and prices tied to organizing a stand at the Fair is also not without significance for the final decision on participation.”
Translated into plain terms: a stand that used to pay for itself through nine days of sales no longer does so reliably, and it has gotten more expensive on top of that. Add the sense that the terms of exhibiting are being decided by a body with no exhibitors on it, and the decision stops being a protest and becomes arithmetic.
What Is Left of Seventy Years
The UIKS decision is not happening in a vacuum. More than twenty members of the Association of Professional Publishers of Serbia (UPIS), among them Arhipelag, Geopoetika and Clio, did not exhibit last year either, and in March they announced they would not be there until conditions change.
“One thing is certain: conscientious members of the publishing community will not take part in the next Book Fair under the stated conditions,” the UPIS Managing Board said at the time.
That closes the loop. The two associations pulling back between them cover nearly all of serious publishing in Serbia, from the commercial houses with the biggest print runs to the ones that carry translated and academic work. Without them, what remains is infrastructure: halls, air conditioning, cash registers and a program.
It is worth recalling where the event came from. The first Yugoslav book fair was held in 1956 in Zagreb, and it moved the following year to the newly built Belgrade Fair, where that first Belgrade edition drew about 60 domestic and 36 foreign publishers from 16 countries. Since then the Fair has skipped only two years, 2020 and 2021, because of the pandemic. The next interruption, if it happens, will have nothing to do with epidemiology and everything to do with the makeup of one city board.
Behind all of this sits another issue publishers openly cite as a reason they wanted a seat at the table in the first place: the announced move of the Fair to the EXPO 27 site in Surčin. The minutes describe a change of location as something that “will be an extremely big and dangerous challenge.” Anyone who has tried to relocate an audience used to one urban ritual knows that an event’s identity does not pack up along with the shelving.
August 20 is the date after which the argument changes subject. Until then, the debate is about who sits on the board. After that, it is about what to do with four empty halls in the last week of October, and whether books in Serbia are still sold in one place at all.
