One possible reason is that people feared censorship might be looming. Now the price will have to go higher, but we can't triple the price of the books. Amelin and his partner took a hard look at the company's bottom line and decided to decrease expenses. In the last five years, the company has published 70 books. There are eight publishing houses in Russia printing literary works.
Printing is fairly cheap in Russia.
Symposium prints its books in St. Petersburg, where the paper is cheaper and there is one company that uses the 19th century typefaces Amelin prefers. Umberto Eco, William Golding, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Vladimir Nabokov are among the authors published by Symposium. Symposium has already published a complete collection of Nabokov's works, something that was impossible in the Soviet era. Born into a family of aristocrats, Nabokov fled Russia after the revolution in 1917.