• Table of contents

    • [+]Preliminaries (3)
    • [+]Introduction (4)
    • [—]Latin America (13)
    • [+]Sub-Saharan Africa (9)
    • [+]Arab World (11)
    • [+]Russia (11)
    • [+]India (11)
    • [+]China (9)
    • [+]Conclusions (6)
    • [+]Appendix (1)

Latin America

Digital publishing houses

The accelerated pace of new developments in the electronic arena has encouraged the growth of native digital publishers, that is to say, publishing houses conceived entirely with the Web in mind. The profile of these ventures is extremely diverse. First of all we find self-publishing houses whose works are distributed in paper (POD) and/or electronic format, as is the case with Autores de Argentina, Liibook (Argentina), KindleBookBr and Mito (Brazil), among many others. The Spanish company Bubok has recently established itself in Argentina – a development that prefigures tight competition in the market for author-released publications.

There are also digital publishing houses (POD and electronic books) with a literary profile, such as El fin de la noche and Blatt&Ríos[1] (Argentina), or an academic one, such as Teseo (Argentina) and ITESM[2] (Mexico). The business model adopted by these publishers is generally oriented towards institutional sales and “the Long Tail”.[3]

Other digital publishing companies champion open access and Creative Commons licences, and are supported by contributions from sponsors and donations. One notable case is LeerLibrosLibres (Argentina). This site, directed by the designer Mario Spina, brings together works on art and culture that can be downloaded free of charge, in PDF format. The platform is entirely constructed using free and open source software.

It is also worth highlighting the ventures that experiment with enhanced reality, such as Manoescrita (Argentina). This publisher sells printed books that are reinforced with multimedia contents available on the Web. Thus, when the book The Pied Piper of Hamelin is placed in front of the webcam, texts, animation and melodies emerge from its pages. María Laura Caruso, the director of Manoescrita, explains:

We wanted to create a different publishing space, one that provided responses to some of the dichotomies of the publishing world. For example, the relation between books and new technologies.[4]


Notes    
  1. Cf. Tabarovsky, Damián: “Novedades editoriales”, Perfil, 26th September, 2010.
  2. Cf. “Serán 105 los ‘e-Books’ que publicará la Editorial Digital en 2011”, Crónica intercampus, 14th January, 2011.
  3. Cf. “Print-on-demand with extras”, Frankfurt Book Fair.
  4. Cf. Boullosa, Cecilia, “La realidad aumentada renueva los clásicos”, Ñ, 5th August, 2010.

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