In Defense of Chile's Exorbitant Book Prices
So my latest breath of fresh air was a trip to Buenos Aires, where we bought about 33 books. A spanish translation of Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River cost 30 bucks, imported from Spain. Not exactly cheap, but I wasn't complaining. Actually I was, but it was a back-handed complaint. In Chile, the same edition costs close to $60.
Apparently the sherpas who lug bundles of paperbacks over the Andes have raised their rates.
No.
Books are incredibly expensive in Chile, always have been, and there's no good reason for this. There are a lot of bad reasons. A book tax, price-gouging publishers and a cultural propensity for feudalism.
The high price of books does nothing for the educational opportunities of the lower class. The vast majority of Santiago is dirt poor, and prone to drugs and violence. And with even a used, flimsy, battered paperback going for upwards of $8 (about a day's wage for the poor, with luck) there's just not much reading going on.
I confronted a local bookseller on Jose Miguel de la Barra in the trendy Bellas Artes district of Santiago. With a twinkle in his eye, and explained that it was the people's fault. But it took a few minutes to warm him up before that argument came out.
He was a short, gaunt man who does a good job looking intellectual in tweed with a frizzy gray hairdo. El Mercurio's Sunday cultural section was splayed out upon a small desk near the entrance, he intermittently nosed through it or bounced around the shop while we talked. He explained to me the book tax wasn't significant, just a few bucks per book. The real reason was simply the higher cost of publishing in Chile.
Understandably I was disposed to understand. Like, it's just the system, man. What was all my anger about? Admittedly, I was softened, yet out of obligation heard myself spouting out something about class consciousness, giving the poor equal access to knowledge, etc. Fortunately, my words probably came out a lot sterner than I felt. Not that they were impressive, but at least they elicited his further defense, which was priceless:
Well, he actually started out by barraging me with the names of North American authors I'd never heard of. Then he told me that when he'd studied North American Literature at a University in the United States, people he met outside of the literature department didn't know any such authors. His point was that Chile's poorly-read masses were no different from those of the United States, so therefore why waste books on them? Why not mark them up? After all, the rich are the only ones who read. Economics, Sonny! We're responding to demand!
Problem is, I didn't study literature nor did I recognize any of those authors. I'm part of those vulgar, illiterate masses who, for sheer economics, should be priced-out of the book buying market.
Gimme a break, buddy. If you wanna play that game you gotta even out the field. Give the average Chilean the same opportunities I, an average North American, had, then let's see how dumb and ignorant they are. And who's to say they don't yearn for access to books? Your receipts won't show it, of course.
And how can you make such an audacious comparison between our societies when North America was publishing black authors in the 18th century but only in 2006 did Chile publish its first Mapuche Indian authored book, Escucha Winka.
And unlike most Chileans who didn't study literature, I'm a North American who didn't study literature but could easily come up with $60 bucks to buy a book, but when that's almost the price of a plane ticket to Buenos Aires, then fuckit.
And that could be the end of it. A small country where it's easy to fix rates on telephone lines, sunglasses, books, whatever. A few scoundrels making a killing cuz they can. But I strongly suspect it's more than that. I mean, it's so strange -- a tax on books? In a country where copper revenues are making state coffers literally overflow? In a country that at the same time has one of the most corrupt and dysfunctional educational systems? Where business interests call the shots and, when necessary, mow down 3,000 striking workers and their families (Santa Maria massacre in Iquique, 1907) or bring in brutal dictatorships like Pinochet (3,000 dead, 30,000 officially recognized torture victims, 17-year gunpoint curfew)?
Limiting access to books is feudalism in a nutshell.
Fortunately, it seems some people are making efforts to disseminate books to the poor. I noticed the Santiago underground "Metro" has a "Mi Libro, Tu Libro" campaign complete with book donation receptacles, posters and...no URL. Also, my friend Martín Harfagar, who I interviewed and will blog about shortly, has been running a library on a remote island in Chiloé for three years. So there's good stuff going on, for sure. At the moment, however, I prefer to criticize that bad. Maybe someone will notice.
Probably not.
Apparently the sherpas who lug bundles of paperbacks over the Andes have raised their rates.
No.
Books are incredibly expensive in Chile, always have been, and there's no good reason for this. There are a lot of bad reasons. A book tax, price-gouging publishers and a cultural propensity for feudalism.
The high price of books does nothing for the educational opportunities of the lower class. The vast majority of Santiago is dirt poor, and prone to drugs and violence. And with even a used, flimsy, battered paperback going for upwards of $8 (about a day's wage for the poor, with luck) there's just not much reading going on.
I confronted a local bookseller on Jose Miguel de la Barra in the trendy Bellas Artes district of Santiago. With a twinkle in his eye, and explained that it was the people's fault. But it took a few minutes to warm him up before that argument came out.
He was a short, gaunt man who does a good job looking intellectual in tweed with a frizzy gray hairdo. El Mercurio's Sunday cultural section was splayed out upon a small desk near the entrance, he intermittently nosed through it or bounced around the shop while we talked. He explained to me the book tax wasn't significant, just a few bucks per book. The real reason was simply the higher cost of publishing in Chile.
Understandably I was disposed to understand. Like, it's just the system, man. What was all my anger about? Admittedly, I was softened, yet out of obligation heard myself spouting out something about class consciousness, giving the poor equal access to knowledge, etc. Fortunately, my words probably came out a lot sterner than I felt. Not that they were impressive, but at least they elicited his further defense, which was priceless:
Well, he actually started out by barraging me with the names of North American authors I'd never heard of. Then he told me that when he'd studied North American Literature at a University in the United States, people he met outside of the literature department didn't know any such authors. His point was that Chile's poorly-read masses were no different from those of the United States, so therefore why waste books on them? Why not mark them up? After all, the rich are the only ones who read. Economics, Sonny! We're responding to demand!
Problem is, I didn't study literature nor did I recognize any of those authors. I'm part of those vulgar, illiterate masses who, for sheer economics, should be priced-out of the book buying market.
Gimme a break, buddy. If you wanna play that game you gotta even out the field. Give the average Chilean the same opportunities I, an average North American, had, then let's see how dumb and ignorant they are. And who's to say they don't yearn for access to books? Your receipts won't show it, of course.
And how can you make such an audacious comparison between our societies when North America was publishing black authors in the 18th century but only in 2006 did Chile publish its first Mapuche Indian authored book, Escucha Winka.
And unlike most Chileans who didn't study literature, I'm a North American who didn't study literature but could easily come up with $60 bucks to buy a book, but when that's almost the price of a plane ticket to Buenos Aires, then fuckit.
And that could be the end of it. A small country where it's easy to fix rates on telephone lines, sunglasses, books, whatever. A few scoundrels making a killing cuz they can. But I strongly suspect it's more than that. I mean, it's so strange -- a tax on books? In a country where copper revenues are making state coffers literally overflow? In a country that at the same time has one of the most corrupt and dysfunctional educational systems? Where business interests call the shots and, when necessary, mow down 3,000 striking workers and their families (Santa Maria massacre in Iquique, 1907) or bring in brutal dictatorships like Pinochet (3,000 dead, 30,000 officially recognized torture victims, 17-year gunpoint curfew)?
Limiting access to books is feudalism in a nutshell.
Fortunately, it seems some people are making efforts to disseminate books to the poor. I noticed the Santiago underground "Metro" has a "Mi Libro, Tu Libro" campaign complete with book donation receptacles, posters and...no URL. Also, my friend Martín Harfagar, who I interviewed and will blog about shortly, has been running a library on a remote island in Chiloé for three years. So there's good stuff going on, for sure. At the moment, however, I prefer to criticize that bad. Maybe someone will notice.
Probably not.
posted by Chileno @ 10:54 PM
Share on Facebook
Search This Blog:
3 Comments:
I get the impression U.S. Americans buy as many books as they buy DVDs but maybe that's because I'm in bookstores in the holiday season when visiting family. My sister Sophia, who works at Borders Books in L.A., when asked what sells the best, said that apart from Harry Potter books, she can't imagine where they make money, and they always claim to be doing poorly. Is it just the usual corporate claim in order to justify downsizing? or do they really sell so little? What's the U.S. illiteracy rate? Chilean?
Ramsey
good post. I agree entirely with your point on the necessity of having cheaper books. Some illegal vendors sell copies of popular books on less quality paper and cheaper prices. Sadly the masses of Chile today are hypnotized by DVD movies and children by video games as well as foreign music.
I do not live in chile but i enjoy your objective opinions as i was once born there. Your arguments are well backed and based on your experience.
well done with this blog. Santiago has so much irony at times i can only laugh at the absurd.
-rei
Ramsey, literacy in Chile is about 95% and in the USA it's 99%. And imo the paper book is far from a dying medium. Borders' crisis prolly has more to do with where and how people buy books, or bad business decisions, who knows.
Rei -
In my experience even books on the street are pretty pricey, for what they are, tattered and shit.
Also as you prolly know it's common to photocopy and distribute. Seems the conception of intellectual property here is a lot closer to that of Asia than it is the United States. With books, though, it seems there's more to it than just lax interpretations of copyright:
A Chilean political prisoner/exile who we interviewed wrote a book during exile in Panama that got published by the Soviet Union, and made its way back into Chile. But it was obviously a banned book, so it was copied and distributed clandestinely.
In college in the US there were always "Readers" which were spiral bound compilations of select chapters photo-copied from 10-20 books created by a professor, and sold (legally, I suppose). But that's only to avoid making students buy 20 books, and even in the US the cost of textbooks are a complaint.
In Chile, asking a student to buy ONE book is too much. A professor must provide ONE copy of the required book to his students, if it is not available in the library. Either way, the students then go and have it photo copied, and if they have a few extra pesos, spiral bound.
So nobody's buying books. Possibly a market opportunity for an editor who might romance the idea of 'having your own REAL textbook' to students, and then sell text books cheaply and cornering a significant demographic. Or he could mastermind a government crackdown on copyright violation and then swoop in with the safe and legal alternative. Hmmm.... ;-)
Anyway, such creative thinking is unlikely to happen in this case. According to one guy in line with me at Telefonica that's the "Spanish" model, don't evangelize or seek a bigger market, but rather just jack up rates for the few you have a grip on.
Seems like the same thing happens with books. Obviously publishers are happy with the small, but rich market they cater to. Otherwise they'd drop prices and bring in more customers.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home