We also have a world-class printing house that prints books for the Scandinavian, Russian, and other markets (though the Lithuanian part of their print business is not as large).
We have niche publishing houses that hatch big and ambitious plans. The Lithuanian Writers' Union hosts meetings with authors and new book presentations, which are quite popular with readers. New literary festivals and new favorite places for book lovers are being created (two examples are the café Paviljonas in Vilnius and the bookstore Mint Vinetu). We have Books from Lithuania, an institution for the dissemination of literature abroad (following the example of Norway's Norwegian Literature Abroad). The Vilnius Book Fair annually attracts around 60,000 visitors, with 500 events taking place over the four days of the fair.
But the book world is still alive and kicking. Unfortunately, the number of people in Lithuania is decreasing as well-we are rapidly declining toward two million people. Today there are fewer publishing houses, just 400. During the Soviet era, many books were translated from Russian, because there were not enough people translating books from other foreign languages. Translations of brand-new books from their original languages became much more common. Those were the years of liberation from mental stagnation, when we got rid of the ideological shackles we'd been wearing in previous years. The restoration of independence in 1990 changed our world dramatically.
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