For lucrative non-Amazon Ibero-American digital markets like Argentine, Colombia and beyond there is an opportunity for publishers to be bold and experiment seriously with digital-optimised pricing policies that can transform the markets where Amazon chooses not to play.
Long since established as the leading distributor of digital books for the Ibero-American market, the only surprise with today’s announcement from Bookwire is that it has taken so long to finalise.
Hereon Bookwire will be delivering Editorial Planeta’s 30,000 e-books and 1,200 audiobooks to Spain and the Latin American markets, as well as the USA, which has the second largest number of Spanish speakers in the world after Mexico.
Editorial Planeta’s output spreads across 70 imprints with 4,000 new titles per year.
For Bookwire, Spanish Markets General Manager González Canova said in the press release:
We are honored and humbled for the opportunity to partner with Editorial Planeta in the coming years. Since the first moment we started working together we saw a sync that would benefit both companies to expand the reach of Planeta’s imprints and catalogues.
Margarita Guerrero, Head of Account Management, Bookwire Spain & Latin America, added:
Planeta’s content is one of the most valuable catalogues in Spanish globally, with many best-selling Authors. We are thankful to Planeta since last summer we started a pilot to distribute a limited selection of audiobooks to the streaming platforms and we are now expanding our partnership to their entire eBook and Audiobook catalogues.
For Editorial Planeta, Santos Palazzi Soler-Roig, Head of Mass Market & Digital, said:
From the very beginning, it was clear to us that using the Bookwire OS platform would help us in the long term to better exploit the potential of our titles. The comprehensive capabilities of the software allow us to analyze our data and sales in a much more dynamic and customized way, thus increasing efficiency.
Bookwire OS is of course the centre of attention here, and rightly so, but the bigger picture is the “dynamic and customized way” in which (any) publisher can “exploit the potential of (its) titles” when those titles are digital.
For publishers in Ibero-America as across the world, the real issue is when will they start offering consumers the choice, cost and accessibility benefits that digital brings, rather than treating digital as a sideshow and pricing and marketing to defend the print status quo.
We’ve seen clearly, in markets where that has happened – Sweden for example – that digital is the consumer’s preference, all other factors being equal.
In the mature English-language markets the dominance of Amazon (for which publishers have only themselves to blame) means they will continue to price ebooks out of the market to protect print (where Amazon’s hold is weaker).
But for most of Ibero-America (Amazon Kindle is only in Spain, Mexico and Brazil, and Audible only lately in Spain) the Amazon factor is not an issue.
For lucrative non-Amazon Ibero-American digital markets like Argentina, Colombia and the full panoply of Spanish-speaking nations across Latin America, there is an opportunity for publishers to be bold and experiment seriously with digital-optimised pricing policies that can transform the markets where Amazon chooses not to play.
Using Bookwire, Editorial Planeta is ideally placed to do so. But how bold will Planeta dare to be?
