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The e-book market in Latin America is trailing far behind those in Europe and the US, frustrating editors gathered at the 40th Buenos Aires International Book Fair (the Feria del Libro de Buenos Aires) which runs until 12th May.
In Argentina, where publishers and readers seem reluctant to abandon print, the e-book market has remained stagnant over the past year. E-books still represent less than 1% of total book sales in Argentina, according to a presentation given at the fair by Daniel Benchimol, director of digital publications consultancy Proyecto451.
Benchimol said that in Latin America, only Brazil has significantly developed digital publishing, with Brazil-based publishers now digitising more than 50% of their content. In Argentina, only 16% of books published in 2013 were digitised, down from 17% in 2012, according to the Argentine Book Chamber (Cámara Argentina Del Libro).
“The ghost of the music business has publishers spooked,” said Natalia San Martín, an account manager at Tap, an e-commerce company that works with numerous bookshops. She was referring to widespread fears in Argentina that promoting digital content would cause sales of printed books to plummet, mirroring the shrinking market for CDs. “But print and digital editions can co-exist,” San Martín told The Bookseller.
E-books and digital publishing were prominent themes during the fair’s three days of presentations and round-table discussions for industry professionals, with seven dedicated sessions on the area.
Attendees said they had begun to embrace change, but Valeria Cipolla, an independent publisher and editor, who was in the audience for Benchimol’s presentation, admitted: “We’re a long way behind. We have to open up more, stop panicking and wake up to this.”
The e-book market in Argentina is limited by an underdeveloped online shopping culture, as well as government taxes that make tablets prohibitively expensive—the Wall Street Journal has cited Argentina as the most expensive place globally to buy an iPad.
Restrictions also make it difficult to import e-readers. “It’s as if we have a ban on technology,” said Adrián Fariña, who imports digital blackboards for the Argentine subsidiary of Spanish company Grammata, which sells the Papyre e-reader. “We’re falling behind,” she argued.
There are also too few digitised books in Spanish to tempt readers away from print, Benchimol said. Amazon’s Kindle platform has just 70,000 books in Spanish, 90% less than its catalogue in English, according to Proyecto451.As a result, the e-book business in Argentina is still unprofitable. “You don’t see a single peso of return on your investment,” said Mariana Quesada, owner of small publishing house Your Own Story.
Furthermore, Felipe Varela, c.e.o. of e-libro.com, a Miami-based company that sells digital library subscriptions to universities in Latin America and the US, said the vast majority of educational institutions in Argentina will not go digital. “It’s a cultural thing; they just don’t get it,” he said.
More than a million visitors were expected to visit the three-week book fair, which opened to the public at the end of April (24th). Authors from Cuba, South Africa, Spain and other countries have appeared at this year’s event.