Read&Connect:Georgia Joins the Global Conversation

Hey ya’ll,

As you know, Radarami was founded on the hypothesis that a nation can’t survive on local newspapers alone.  We've crunched the numbers and nearly 70% of Georgians do not have the language facility to read a book in any major language, including Russian. Publishers aren't interested in this small, poor market. The "small language trap" means Georgians are in the dark when it comes to major global issues and starved of new ideas.  We believe that there is a cadre of isolated and intellectually hungry souls eager for information about the world beyond their borders—a world that's only available to speakers of major languages.  It is with your help that we are pulling them out of the dark.

So here it is, what we’ve been up to the last three months:

In December we published Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt.  Radarami received an impressive amount of press coverage for the launch, including television appearances, radio interviews, and print media.  We held a panel discussion on the relevance of the book for Georgia in January, featuring Radio Free Europe journalist Salome Asatiani. Despite the Christmas and New Year Holiday, it was a standing room only crowd.  

What's more, our initial print run of Ill Fares the Land sold out within the first month, so we're scurrying to nail down funds for a second run. Our PR coordinator is complaining about the number of calls from bookstores asking for more copies, and readers are writing in to our text message system to report outages in their local shops. What can I say—it's a good problem to have.

One of our most gratifying moments came when Radarami received a handwritten letter from a man serving a sentence in Gldani prison.  His sister brought him copies of Radarami books, and he read all of them.  He wrote to thank us for the project, to tell us how inspired he was; he and his sister are now organizing an essay competition based on our books for those incarcerated in Georgian prisons. 

We are still getting many, many text messages about past book. My personal favorite was a reader in a remote village in Western Georgia (northeast of Abasha for those of you in the know). He texted us to complain that his village library only had 2 copies of Kathyrn Schulz’s book Being Wrong and both were checked out. His friend had one of the copies and when he scanned it, he knew he had to read it, so what could we do about it? Of course we sent the guy his own copy. We had no idea our books had made it that far.

Switch by Chip and Dan Heath went off to the printer this last week.  We held a hugely attended launch in the regional capital Zugdidi, with over 130 people showing up! Michael Lewis' Boomerang is the next book up. We have secured rights for another 5 or 6 titles beyond that, and so the pipeline is strong.  

If you have any other questions or comments, please email mitch@radarami.org.

Warm wishes from Tbilisi,

The Radarami Team