2024-01-07 20:48:00
If in recent years making a book in Argentina was a very difficult undertaking, from now on everything seems to indicate that it will be almost unviable. Most publishers—small ones, especially—agree that the new economic scenario puts them on the brink of the abyss.. The recent announcements will be market friendlyas President Milei says, but not books friendly. And it is logical. Appealing to the Aristotelian topoi of more and less, if they do not take care of food, why should they take care of books and all that nonsense of publishers and booksellers who try to preserve their “privileges” of “caste” and continue parasitizing the State through ministerial purchases?
According to the worldview of libertarians, The book is another commodity and therefore must be governed only by the laws of the Market, like everything else.. If the activity is not profitable then they should produce incense, or craft beer. The world we are heading towards perhaps does not need so many books, nor so many writers. Paraphrasing González Fraga’s famous phrase, perhaps they made the average employee believe that he could publish books or edit them and it turns out that this—writing, editing—was a populist illusion, a chimera sustained by the distortion of prices and that state oppression that so much It affected us. Now we will soon have freedom, even if we have to pay some cost. We will have freedom but we will not have books.
Let’s go to the numbers. Since the devaluation that took the dollar to more than 800 pesos, The price of paper took a jump for which it is difficult to find a close precedent. Some publishers say that printers are passing budgets with an 80% increase, or even more. Carolina Rolle, from the Rosario publishing house Beatriz Viterbo, says that In October, a 116-page book, in a print run of 500 copies, cost $1,135 and now that same book costs $2,270..
Pablo Gabo Moreno, from the Caleta Olivia publishing house, tells of a similar situation. On December 2, they gave him a quote for $790,000, but on December 13 he asked again and the price was already $1,489,000. “I’m going to take until the end of the year and see what I decide, but I won’t be able to produce under these conditions”he says, and these words are repeated by many other editors.
Juan Pampín, president of the Argentine Book Chamber, explains that the cost of paper, which historically did not reach 35% of the industrial cost of the book, today already represents more than 55%. “Basically the paper mills, which are an oligopoly made up of Celulosa and Ledesma, are taking more than any of the actors in the book industry chain”dice.
But it’s not just about those companies. Enrique Ferraro, from the Tecnooffset printing company, which works with dozens of small publishers, remembers that national production never met demand. Given the lack of paper, printers often have no other option than to go to the few that can import and who set the price they want.because “either you buy from them or you don’t buy from anyone,” he says, and considers that “opening imports would put a limit on local abuse and end speculation by the few importers who have access to the market.”
The problem is that a measure of this nature can be a pharmakon, that is, a remedy and at the same time a poison, because in such a scenario there would be many publishers – especially those that publish children’s literature – that would choose to print in other countries such as China and The local printing industry would suffer a decrease in demand. Furthermore, and as several editors we spoke to fear, The indiscriminate opening of imports would bring the same thing as always: the balance of the “mother country.” Entire containers with books that are not always, as they say, a simple detritus of dubious quality. Although there is some of that, we are not going to deny it, the truth is that decent commercial hardcover editions also tend to arrive – many of them of literary classics – or the remainder from independent Spanish publishers. “I think that something similar to what happened at the beginning of the nineties with the menemato is coming, when the bookstores were filled with those leftover books from the big markets, and that ends up competing for the space in the bookstores,” says Pampín. .
The outlook could not be more discouraging, although there are those who glimpse a small opportunity in exports. Pablo Braun, director of Eterna Cadencia, says that “The positive thing among the many negative things is that we will be able to export better, let’s say, with the dollar being at 800 our books for importers from other countries are much better in price in dollars. And that will favor the exports of the publishers that we export.”
Now, how many publishers export? According to the Argentine Book Chamber, In the country there are only sixty publishers that export more than ten thousand dollars, and most of them have nothing to do with literature.. An almost colorful fact is that more than thirty-five percent of total exports—five million dollars—correspond to the Asociación Casa Editora Sudamericana, linked to the Church of the Seventh Day. Christianity continues to be a profitable company. Outside of these numbers, there are small publishers that export via Courier – a system that, in these cases, is on the verge of legality – but these are such small orders that they do not alter any equation. Furthermore, and as Pampín recalls, it must be taken into account that “Shipping costs in Argentina greatly exceed 15% when in the rest of the world it is 3 or 4%”.
Exports, then—let us summarize—do not seem to be a significant incentive in the face of the decline in the domestic market, as Pablo Braun himself recognizes, nor in the face of increased costs. Let us remember that, in addition to paper, gasoline also increased, and that substantially worsens the equation. Carlos Gazzera, from the Córdoba publishing house Eduvim, explains that today the cost of freight modifies any possibility of being efficient in even regional distribution. “Sending boxes from Córdoba to Rosario, or from Villa María to Córdoba, or Carlos Paz, has a very high cost for many editors and they are not going to do it. The distributors that were operating with some regularity today began to have problems with transportation.”
To all this, on the other hand, two important points must be added. One is that the large bookstore chains—Yenny, from the Grüneisen family; Cúspide, from the Clarín group—continue to settle in ninety days and that ends up liquefying any eventual profits. With a projected inflation of more than thirty percent per month, it is impossible to reinvest the money they receive after three months in producing more books. That is why there are those who are appealing to a desperate strategy: they put the books at a very high price so that none are sold, that is: they prefer not to sell until there is some type of certainty. That’s how things are. AND In the case of authors, the situation is even more ridiculous, because they collect royalties—if they collect them at all—after six months or a year, depending on the contract they have.. The possibility of making a living from writing has never been a more anachronistic discussion. Soon it will not even be possible to pay the electricity bill with the coins that the writers receive.
Now, the other point, which puts at risk and alters all the links in the book ecosystem, is the possible repeal of the Law for the Defense of Book Activity, which since 2001 establishes that it is the publishers who set the price of the book. book for all points of sale, which prevents large stores, large chains that, of course, have more resources, from engaging in that perverse practice that we have already seen in other countries: making discounts to end the competition and , then considerably raising prices. In England, when the so-called Net Book Agreement – a fixed price agreement – was repealed, five hundred independent bookstores closed. Deregulation did not bring healthy competition but a Darwinian and ruthless struggle for life where not the fittest survived, those who know the trade, those who know, but the most powerful, which in that case were the supermarkets. In this regard, there is an article from The Guardian that explains it very well. Since the fixed price law was repealed in 1997, “the market has shrunk and the shelf life of novels is much shorter,” says Sam Jordison. “Statistics tell us that more books are published, but most of them are self-published. There were roster reductions, mergers, collapses, layoffs and losses on a scale never seen before.”
Faced with this possibility, Mónica Dinerstein, president of the Argentine Chamber of Independent Bookstores—an entity created last month—says that she is still a little “shocked” and understands that, If the so-called “Omnibus Law” is approved, the same thing would happen as in England: there would be a huge number of bookstores that could disappear. “I don’t think it’s bad that large stores exist, because we can all sell books, but if everyone is going to set the price they want and do what they want, we won’t be able to put up with it,” he says.
Naturally, the concern also extends to other sectors. It’s known that, If the independent bookstores lose, if they close, they also lose—and may also close—those hundreds of small publishers that, by the way, have conveyed much of the best Argentine literature of the last twenty years. (and therefore the authors and readers also lose). The case of Sebastián Maturano, from the Córdoba publishing house Borde Perdido, is similar to that of many others. “We distribute our books in independent, small and medium-sized bookstores, and they are the ones who allowed us from the beginning to be able to display our catalog in their windows and shelves, something that was fundamental for us, especially when we were just starting out and the small bookstores in Córdoba first, and from Buenos Aires, Rosario, Salta and Mendoza later, they allowed us to enter that circuit.”
As things are, the perspective on what is coming, and on this point everyone agrees, is catastrophic, and it is difficult to think of a darker scenario.. The cocktail – let us summarize – includes an abrupt fall in the domestic market, an excessive increase in the price of paper and gasoline, deferred payments in an almost hyperinflationary context, opening of imports and entry of balance books, possible repeal of the law for the defense of book activity, and let’s also add a very probable cessation of state purchases and subsidies from the National Arts Fund.
From PERFIL we tried to get Leonardo Cifelli, Secretary of Culture, to explain if there is going to be any cultural policy to promote the publishing industry.but he did not want to speak and it is most likely one of those cases where silence says it all.
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