In Spain a book is published every six minutes. It is the symptom of a bubble that does not stop inflating

When talking about the health of the editorial industry in Spain, publication figures are usually used to justify the good condition that the book business lives. However, rapid accounts lead to thinking perhaps just the opposite: excess launches may be hypertrophy the bookstores, which are suffocated by a series of very uninjury side effects.

How much is published? The Latest public data from the Ministry of Culture They speak of 92,000 books a year with ISBN, that is, more than 250 books a day. Every minute, six books. And that telling only the launches with legal deposit, that is, we do not count the self -edge (last year, it was around the three newspapers … By author) For platforms as widespread as Amazon. That do not count as part of the editorial cake but add thousands of potential titles per month to the mountain of slopes of the troubled readers.

Success is what is sought. Why so much novelty? There are a number of reasons that make up a very complex ecosystem to explain this production overdose. On the one hand, it is an editorial strategy for compensate for the fall in sales by book: except Bestsellers And specific successes, the books sell less, the runs are lower and the publishers multiply their offer to cushion it. From there comes a constant publication and search of that new success that supplies the previous one. The fact that Increase global income Although the runs fall, it is proof that The strategy works. Oihan Iturbide, former Editor, counted in the jump that “the editorial industry looks more like a fast food chain than a restaurant with a good homemade menu: the key is in volume, not in quality.”

Many are. On the other hand, there is the proliferation of new publishers: In 2024Spain had approximately 3,160 active publishers. It does not imply a very notable change with respect to previous years (comparable to 2016, and notoriously less than 3,564 of 2009, year with Spain in a very different economic context). Of these, only about 2,000 publishers launch more than 10 titles per year, and only 13 exceed 700 annual titles. Is it a note of diversity and vitality of the sector? Yes. But also of the enormous contrast between the large Spanish editorial groups (Planet and Penguin Random House, more Santillana in the educational field) and the rest: According to the Federation of the Editors Guildthree out of four books come from these groups.

The distribution fish. This overproduction atmosphere (Rubén Hernández, by Errata Naturae, Talk about those 92,000 books per year “One third is returned to the darkness of the stores and is probably guillotine”) is contaminated with the complex distribution system in Spain. This is also Hernández: “The publisher publishes with a price (…) of 10 euros and it is sent to the distributor. The bookseller buys it with a discount close to 35%, from which he obtains his benefit, and pays 6.5 euros to the distributor, which stays 2 euros and pays the remaining 4.5 euros, that he does not pay him, but offers him a loan. “

The snowball continues to grow: “In turn, the distributor claims to the editor of his 4.5 euros, which he does not pay him, so he contracts a debt. And to reimburse it, the editor has no choice but to invest the 4.5 euros he has won (but he must) in another book that, after arriving at the bookseller, activates his credit, while the distributor enters another 2 euros. Book, the editor and the bookseller receive debts or credits. A vitiated system very similar to a bubble that continues to grow without brake.

Are all bad news? No: the evidence that it is published too much allows publishers to realize that The situation can become unsustainable. Possible solutions to Very vicious system of returns in bookstores. The excess of supply is not bad in itself, unless it leads to overproduction and atibor the system until it is bursting. It is obvious that six books per minute are too many, but … who is the first to start with the cuts?

Header | Photo of Pierre Bamin in Unspash

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