Bookstores with a lot of soul in Bilbao
The Villa of Bilbao It houses bookstores that work with titles that are far from the massive and conventional. In its exhibitors you can find essays that deal, for example, with reggaeton as a tool for anti-racist cultural activism or novels that deal with the experience of motherhood from an atypically subversive approach. One of them, La Ilusa, was awarded on November 6 as the best new business in the Bilbao Favorites awards.
“It has made us very excited. That there are businesses and entities that recognize your work is very satisfying ”, assesses Beatriz Albarrán, who, together with her brother Sergio, raised the blind on her business on February 7. Beatriz affirms that some people around her were very surprised by her business model. “A bookstore in 2022? How delusional you are!” they came to tell him. However, the decision to start a bookstore in the 21st century is not, as some consider, such an illusory idea. And it is that, despite the fact that the general perception points to the contrary, the publishing market is booming.
In 2021 the publishing sector english -in which the less conventional publishers are also found- billed a total of 2,576.7 million euros, almost 137 million euros more than in the previous year. This is confirmed by the data compiled by the Publishing Market Analysis, which annually studies the evolution of the sector in the State. This same study also shows that billing figures have not stopped rising in the last decade. Not even the pandemic unleashed by the covid – whose economic consequences resulted in weighing down the economy of many countries – has been able to flatten this upward curve.
“The Endless Funeral March”
Sergio Albarrán assures that there are many voices that have been predicting the death of the book for years. “As with the cinema, they have been saying it for years. It’s like an endless funeral march,” jokes the bookseller. In this regard, Javier Nevado, owner of the Anti bookstore, assures that the release of the eBook to the market was, for some people, the definitive death sentence of the book. “In 2005, when they said it was going to come out, everyone said that the paper book was going to disappear. It came out in 2010 and was well received, but it has barely grown since it went on the market and we are still here”, Nevado ditch.
Despite everything, Nevado believes that it is difficult to recover the reading habits of previous decades. “It is evident that before, much more was read. There was also more time for it, among other things, because the internet did not yet exist, ”he says. He believes, yes, that there are people who go to the pages to disconnect from the screen.
It seems that In Bizkaia there are many people who immerse themselves in books and turn off their laptops, mobile phones and tablets. This is shown by a study published by the Department of Equality, Justice and Social Policies of the Basque Government. It states that half of the youth of Euskadi used to read books in their free time. specifically, 48.8% of the young people interviewed stated in 2021 that they had read a book for leisure (that is, not related to your studies or your profession) in the previous month. This figure was lower than those registered in 2012 or 2016, but higher than that of 2008. The data obtained in this analysis also show that the CAV exceeds many parts of the State in number of readers. It is, in fact, the second autonomous community in which the most literature is consumed. Thus, everything indicates that this trend will continue over time.