The publishing world has been one of the cultural sectors hardest hit during the first year of pandemic. According to data from the Ecuadorian Book ChamberIn 2020, a total of 4,349 titles were registered, 13.17% less than in 2019.
Likewise, 2,608,015 copies were registered, 57.96% less, compared to the production of 2019, when 6,203,547 copies were registered.
In the opinion of Oswaldo Almeida, president of the Ecuadorian Chamber of Books, these figures show the deep crisis that the sector is going through. In other countries, especially Europeans – he says – sales almost remained similar to those of 2019.
Almeida adds that it must be recognized that there are more reading societies, but emphasizes that during the last year many people realized that reading can become an important tool for resilience.
“People turned to the consumption of TV and forgot that you can find good soap operas. But they have also been devoted to good books on exercises at home, meditation, self help The kitchen room”. Almeida comments about it.
An interesting fact, despite the crisis, is that 40 new publishers were registered in the country. One of them is Siamesa Editores, specialized in publishing non-fiction literature.
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César Salazar, owner of the publishing house, says that he began working on the launch of this label before the pandemic, but the emergency disrupted his plans. The first months of last year he put the project on hold; then he decided to resume it, he is convinced that interest in reading has grown in the country.
Salazar, who is also part of the publishing house El Fakir, argues that there is a market for niche readers in the country.
“Here, for example, there are many publishers focused on fiction literature, but very few specialized on non-fiction, on essays,
in the chronicles or in the profiles ”, says Salazar.
Another revealing data on the sector is the increase in the production of digital titles, which went from 709 in 2015 to 2 154 in 2020.
One of the Ecuadorian companies that is betting on the publication of digital books is Animal Editors Fund. Isabel Mármol, director of this publishing house, says that this initiative is linked to the problems of access to books during the pandemic.
“This crisis has brought us closer to the technology and that’s why the digital books they began to take on more importance. Now people are more open to e-Books and that is why we have opted for them ”, he says.
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For Almeida, rather than showing a consumer trend, the sustained appearance of publishers in the last five years (202 in total) and a greater number of digital titles show an attempt to find new markets.
“It reflects a bet on the part of the publishing sector; a response to a growing demand from the public. I think that next year we will be able to have figures to see if this bet worked or not ”.
Among the five topics with the highest number of titles registered during the past year are: use of textbooks (186); law (133); Ecuadorian novels (130); sociology and anthropology (127) and Ecuadorian poetry (114).
One of the projects that has opted for poetry in digital format is World Alphabet, a collection created by La Castalia, from Venezuela, and Línea Imaginaria, from Ecuador.
Aleyda Quevedo is part of the editorial team. She explains that the collection was born for new readers to enter the world of poetry. “During the pandemic we began to think of new ways to reach readers and we decided to give another value to the digital book.”
In relation to the demographic distribution of the titles registered in the country, Pichincha maintains the highest number of ISBN registrations: 2 438 titles, which represents 56.06% of the total. The second province is Guayas, with 593 and the third is Loja, with 528 titles.
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