The Future of Publishing Super Powers, featuring China, Mexico, and South Africa. All 3 publishing economies have stories to tell about their markets and aspirations, revealing points of strengths and weakness that we may not have seen otherwise, without the pressure of the pandemic.

In this podcast, we are not talking about the pandemic per se, but we are going to be touching on things that it brings to light, things that it helps us understand about the world we're in right now and about where publishing may be able to take advantage of things opening up to us as we go.

We're going to ask each of our speakers to give us a short presentation about his or her market so that we get a sense for where things stand, what things look like, how things are going. We then come together for some discussion and to explore the points raised.

We start with Roberto Banchik, who is director-general at Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial in Mexico and gives us a detailed review of the Mexican publishing market.

“So first thing to say is that the Mexican book market is a big market in terms of production, more than 300 million units. Books are produced almost every year, this has been very stable over the years. At least before 2020, this was the case. Most of this is production done by the government. This is a particularity of the Mexican book market. 

The government has a huge participation within it, 50% of all books produced are produced by the state, or are produced by private publishers for the government. And that's almost 30% of all books produced.” Roberto Banchik Director General at Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial in Mexico.

Li Pengyi, the Publishers Association of China, familiar to many of us in the international industry for the work he does, particularly with the IPA and other organizations, speaks about the publishing universe in China.

Li explains that China is a big publishing power based on market size. Our country highly regards the development of both education and culture. Together with the rapid growth of our GDP and a strong demand, people in China have more books to read and more opportunities to get better

“Along with the development of a new technology, China's publishing industry is becoming more diversified. Digital publishing is one of the most distinguished segments. In the year 2018, the gross revenue of China's digital publishing industry, including E-books, online education, games, et cetera was 120 billion US dollars, an increase of 18% over the previous year. Being another significant part of the digital publishing, the online literature is also growing rapidly.” Li Pengyi The Publishers Association of China.

Thabiso Mahlape, the founder of BlackBird Books in South Africa discusses the publishing industry in South Africa. She talks about how racially charged everything still is in South Africa and the socioeconomic inheritance of apartheid still plays a very big role in terms of how publishing looks and what publishing is. South Africa doesn’t have a lot of E-retailers, even for physical books. So, the bookselling still is very physical creating a digital divide, the use of credit cards is limited to a minority so, Thabiso explains that even if there was the opportunity to purchase online, the means of payment would not be available to the majority.

“Traditionally, we have approached publishing as a highbrow, elite environment and we're leaving everyone out in the cold. And if I think back, myself, of how I became a reader and how I was reading Mills & Boon and how I practically read every Danielle Steel, which I can't stand now. And the thing is we have to allow everyone their Mills & Boon.” Thabiso Mahlape, Founder of BlackBird Book.