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| CLICK HERE NOW FOR FREE ONLINE SPANISH LESSONS Book Prices in Chile
Books are really expensive in Chile. They 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 perhaps 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 elicit his basis for that. He was a short, gaunt man who does a good job looking professorial in tweed with a frizzy gray hairdo. El Mercurio's Sunday cultural section was splayed out upon a small desk near the entrance, he donned spectacles to nose through it when he wasn't bounced around the shop as 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. And that could be the end of it. A small country where it's easy to fix rates. 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 andtheir 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. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy to keep people down, but it does seem to be a tendency. Hopefully just a cultural relic that will correct itself. 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 is hope. © Copyright 2005 - 2011 Chileno |
