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‘I pay in installments’: in Argentina, books are a luxury item now
Carla Chaves was carefully perusing the offerings of the Penguin Random House stand at the Buenos Aires Book Fair in Palermo. An avid reader and frequent participant in literary workshops — when she spoke to the Herald, she was working her way through the works of James Joyce and Herman Melville — Chaves, 43, estimates that she used to buy at least two books a month and sometimes more. No longer.
“I’m very selective now,” she said. “I used to shop around. Now I look for specific titles, and I pay in installments.”
Hector Rivera, a 40-year-old editor from Colombia, has taken to purchasing physical books exclusively for work.
“When I read for pleasure, I prefer digital copies because the cost is 20 or 30% less,” he said.
Living costs in Argentina have ballooned following a 54% devaluation of the peso in December, and the publishing industry has been hit particularly hard. Since then, the average price of a trade paperback has climbed from around AR$10,000 to nearly twice that, according to Cecilia Fanti, vice president of the Chamber of Independent Bookstores.
The Milei administration recently raised the minimum monthly salary in Argentina to AR$234,000 (US$254 at the official dollar rate, US$222 at the MEP rate). At the Buenos Aires Book Fair, a softcover copy of The Shining by Stephen King went for AR$40,500 with a 10% discount for customers who pay in cash.
The reasons behind this sticker shock are multifarious. Monthly inflation was 11% for the month of March, down from 13.2% in February, and cumulative inflation sits at 51.6% for 2024. Still, industry insiders are quick to point to an Argentine paper manufacturing duopoly that has seized on this crisis to drive up prices — and a government that is unlikely to come to the industry’s........
© Buenos Aires Herald
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