Tiny fingers wiggle through the holes in the pages of A Moverse (‘Let’s Get Moving’), a children’s picture-book that lets readers pretend their digit is a cat’s tail or penguin’s beak. While managers in suits talk print-runs and profits in one hall of the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the world’s biggest Spanish-language literary get-together (staged in early December), shrieks of excitement can be heard from young customers in the children’s area next door.
Illiteracy and poverty once denied the pleasure of reading to many Latin Americans. That should no longer be the case: a quarter of Mexicans born before 1950 are officially classed illiterate but only 2 percent of those under 30. And less than a third of Latin Americans now live below the poverty line, compared with half in 1990.
The newspaper business has taken note. Paid-for daily newspaper circulation in Latin America rose by 5 percent (21 percent in Brazil and 16 percent in Mexico) between 2005-2009, according to Larry Kilman of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. In books, the picture is more mixed. Publishers are churning out more new titles than ever. Sales in (Portuguese-speaking) Brazil, the biggest market, are rising. Last December, Britain’s Pearson (which owns 50 percent of The Economist) announced the purchase by its Penguin subsidiary of 45 percent of Companhia das Letras, Brazil’s most innovative literary publisher.
Things are less bright in the Spanish-speaking world. In Mexico and Argentina, Latin America’s second and third markets, book sales have been falling. Mexico’s publishers’ association says that total sales last year were 139 million copies, down by 12 percent from 2005. Many of these are textbooks, for which demand is pretty steady. But in the four years to 2009, sales of novels fell by 39 percent (to 8 million) and of children’s books by 42 percent to 13 million. That was the year that recession whacked Mexico. With economic recovery, many publishers at the Guadalajara fair, which closed on December 4, report better sales.
The stagnation has deeper roots. Headline statistics flatter the reading prowess of Latin Americans. However, international tests show almost half the region’s secondary-school pupils fail to reach the “minimum acceptable level” of literacy, according to the OECD, a mainly rich-country think-tank. Some middle-class adults set a poor example: book lovers cringed when Enrique Peña Nieto, who leads the opinion polls in Mexico’s presidential election, seemed stumped when asked at Guadalajara to name three books that had made a mark on him (he eventually came up with the Bible, the novels of Jeffrey Archer and The Eagle’s Throne by Carlos Fuentes, whose authorship he misattributed).
Technology has been slow to disrupt this low-volume, high-margin business. Internet bookselling has been hampered by relatively low levels of broadband penetration and poor postal services. Amazon (and its Kindle e-reader) set up shop in Spain only last year; it has plans to enter Chile, Argentina and Brazil. About 4,000 e-book titles are already available in Portuguese in Brazil, according to O’Reilly Media, a consultancy. Roberto Feith of Editora Objetiva, a publisher, has forecast that e-books will make up 7 percent of the Brazilian book market by 2015. Time for Spanish-language publishers to wake up.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)