The unstoppable rise of the e-book
The popularity of electronic reading devices, such as the Kindle, is seeing demand for electronic texts shoot up, but not everyone in the sector is happy
Is the Spanish publishing ecosystem being dynamited or dynamized? When Amazon's e-reader, the Kindle, burst on to the scene in December with 28,000 Spanish-language titles in tow - some priced at just two or three euros - the world of books started changing forever.
New online publishers and bookstores are now joining a price war in a world where everything is suddenly being questioned - from the way we read, down to what we call a book. Confusion reigns when it comes to distinguishing between the physical device (the electronic reader) and the content (the text in electronic format). Device makers are fighting the former battle, publishing houses are caught up in the latter, and Amazon is busy on both fronts.
The novelist Juan Gómez-Jurado is hearing the gunfire from the front lines, and firing a few shots himself. The Kindle edition of his book El emblema del traidor (or, The traitor's emblem) has been at the top of Amazon Spain's bestseller list for over a month. "My contract prevents me from revealing how many I have sold, but it's been thousands," he says. Gómez-Jurado sets the price of the book (which in just one week has gone from 1.49 euros to 2.68 euros). "I aim to make a euro on each book sale, the rest is for Amazon."
But El emblema del traidor is a peculiar novel for another reason: it can be found in electronic format at two different prices: 2.68 euros on Amazon.es and 7.99 euros on Casadellibro.com. This, in principle, violates Spanish fixed-price legislation, establishing that the same edition of a book cannot be offered at two different prices on national territory. Gómez-Jurado explains: "In one case it is being sold directly by the author; in the other the publisher is an intermediary."
But if anybody knows about aggressive strategies, it's B de Books, a label launched in November by the publisher Ediciones B. "We decided to offer the lowest prices on the market with regard to paper (between 1.99 and 9.99 euros). We wanted the distance between digital books and paper books to be as great as possible," says director Ernest Folch. His label sells titles on Amazon and other online stores such as Leqtor.com and Fnac.es, although he will not reveal any specific figures. "We sold three times more e-books in December than in previous months," he says.
Over at Anagrama, a traditional publisher, Paula Canal takes the euphoria down a notch. "With bestsellers you can set that kind of price because you are selling millions of copies, but what about books with print runs of no more than 1,000?" she asks. "There is no future for them with such prices in a healthy publishing environment, in which there are still small editions of hard-to-find titles."
Anagrama is wary of Amazon's arrival. "For now, we're not letting them sell our titles in Latin America and the United States, where there are no fixed prices, so they will not compete with other online stores with which we've signed contracts," adds Canal.
Diego Moreno, of Nórdica Libros, recently decided to join the fray. "This year we started out with an exclusively digital line (priced at 4.99 euros) and another line with stories by Pirandello, which we are going to sell individually at a price of 0.99 euros. The logic of the electronic book is for it to be priced much cheaper than paper books. It's a new way to think of books and readers. These works are light fare and cannot cost as much as a paper book."
The writer Rosa Montero has self-published three works for Kindle, consisting of compilations and out-of-print books. "We have lost precious time paddling against the tide of new technologies," notes Montero, who is also a columnist for EL PAÍS. "This slowness has favored (internet) pirates and now it seems like the only people who have to give away things for free are creators, when nobody questions the fact that you have to pay for the reading device."
Montero has also joined the chorus of voices asking that VAT on the e-book be reduced from 18 percent to four percent, a bracket that paper books already enjoy.
Eighty percent of all digital books sold in Spain first go through a partnership called Libranda. Created in 2010 by several major industry players such as Random House Mondadori, Planeta and Santillana (owned by Grupo Prisa, like EL PAÍS), this online distributor manages the launch of digital books by 30 publishers who later sell them on Amazon.
Libranda director Arantza Larrauri has a favorable opinion of Kindle: "For the electronic book to get media coverage will help create a culture of digital reading," she says, adding that something is definitely afoot in the industry. "New publishers, both small and midsize, are joining. They're starting to take steps."
According to Libranda, literary works in digital format will represent one percent of sales in 2012, which is five times more than in 2011.
Pilar Gallego, treasurer for the Spanish Confederation of Bookseller Associations, with 1,600 member stores, believes that there is room for everyone in the book market.
"Paper editions are still being sold, especially when it comes to children's and young adults' literature, where books are very showy," she says. Gallego also feels that the Amazon phenomenon is being overrated. "It's more about the publicity that their e-readers get than about actual download figures."
In fact, Amazon's real goal may not be in the books themselves, suggests Antonio María Dávila, director of the Federation of Spanish Publishers. "It might be a case of a mad business strategy to just sell the Kindle - which in my opinion is rather bad, as all cheap things are - because they are not in the content business."
"There are other ways of doing culture and publishing"
Virtual libraries, LPs, movies, festivals... they are all projects and artworks that belong to everybody and nobody. So, at least, goes the theory of "the commons," which has been the object of research at Spain's digital culture laboratories, most notably Medialab-Prado in Madrid, CCCB Lab and Platoniq in Barcelona, ColaBoraBora in Bilbao and the Reina Sofía contemporary art museum.
This collective thinking has already produced tangible results: Bookcamping, Fundación Robo, Traficantes de Sueños, the Zemos98 festival and other initiatives that promote the concept of the commons. This idea of shared or commonly owned resources also goes a long way toward explaining the attitudes behind the 15-M protest movement against Spain's political class and the widespread opposition to anti-piracy legislation known as the Sinde Law.
Updated by Elinor Ostrom, a US political economist who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on the subject, the commons refers to goods that belong to everyone.
Supporters believe that air, water, scientific knowledge, software and cultural work are all part of the commons, and digital technology is enabling this new paradigm to colonize the world of (public and private) cultural management.
"The commons are in vogue, for better or for worse," say Sofía Coca, Felipe G. Gil and Pedro Jiménez, the organizers of a festival called Zemos98, held every March in Seville. "The market has understood that sharing and remixing are two words that users have adopted, and it is mulling it over. That is why we have to defend projects in which sharing has a political or social component."
"The digitalization of culture has brought about unexpected changes for many, especially for the old model that the culture industry is based on. Our festival has hosted hundreds of artists, activists and educators, and nearly all of them share the need to create common areas in which to share ideas, methodologies and processes," they add.
Alternative licensing systems such as Creative Commons and the copyleft movement, which the greater public are more familiar with, are just one side of the commons. The Spanish term for it - procomún - has been around for centuries, by the way.
"It was in Nebrija's dictionary," says Antonio Lafuente, head of the commons lab at Medialab-Prado, in reference to the 15th-century volume. Funded by the city of Madrid, Medialab-Prado is a research facility for "academics and activists" from various fields, ranging from biologists and anthropologists to cultural managers, hackers and jurists. Champions of the commons go one step further with regard to ownership of creation, and hold that the creator must return his work to others: this is what is known as social return.
"For someone creative to come up with something, he or she has had to read a lot of things, participate in seminars and view exhibitions," says Lafuente. "There is a cultural atmosphere that creates the groundwork for creativity. You also need infrastructure: libraries, transportation, access channels... There is a dimension to creation that is communal, and that is why it's simply absurd for someone who comes up with something to be granted exclusive rights over it for Lord knows how many years."
This social sciences researcher from the Spanish National Research Council admits that he and his colleagues have more than once been labeled anarchists and communists.
Initiatives such as Bookcamping (bookcamping.cc) are based on the concept of the commons. This virtual library lets anyone upload books, video and audio with open licenses. "They are copyrighted but their dissemination is authorized," explains Jessica Romero, one of the people behind this initiative.
Bookcamping emerged out of the 15-M movement, to the cry of "If you don't want to be like them, then read." The project puts publishers, authors and booksellers in touch. "We want to prove that there are other ways of doing culture and publishing books. The case of Lucía Etxebarría is a paradigm: she complains about how little she makes on each book after paying managers and agents - this shows that the rhetoric about intellectual rights does not really defend the creator but rather the industry. We need to rethink the production processes. It's just like music: musicians no longer live off the sale of products, but off their concerts."
This is confirmed by Daniel Alonso, a member of the Seville band Pony Bravo: "You can work in this way. Following this philosophy, we share our albums on mp3 format. We've set up labels and we have people working for us. Eighty percent of our revenue comes from concerts."
In order to finance some of these projects, defenders of the commons have created Goteo (goteo.org), which defines itself as "a social network for co-funding creative projects and distributed collaboration." By mid-December, the crowdfunding site had collected over 5,000 euros from 131 contributors, whose money went to help projects such as Tuderechoasaber.es, a site that wants to help citizens gain access to information held by public institutions, in the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act in the US.
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