Book Shopping In Portugal

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

For those who don’t know this, I am in Portugal at the moment, visiting my parents till the middle of June.

 

It’s not quite a return to familiar hunting grounds.  First, I’ve never lived in Portugal as an adult – I went to the States straight out of college.  The rhythms and obligations of a responsible adult in Portugal are completely unknown and often mysterious.  Second, the country has changed a lot since I was here.  When I left there was one mall.  It was a mini-mall, with maybe ten shops, and it was in downtown Porto.

 

So I was a little surprised when a visit to the bookstore, to spend a gift card my dad got for his birthday took me to the mall in what used to be one of the nearest villages.  The mall was both familiar and oddly different.  Yes, there were all the usual accouterments of a mall, including a food court, but the lay out was different, and there were very few people there, and none of them looked like mall rats.

 

The bookstore was different too.  Portugal, in some ways has always been ahead of the US when it comes to book marketing.  Okay.  In a bad way.  You know how towards the end of the old model, there, before ebooks changed the game, no one kept back lists?  Portugal was always like that.  I’m not sure why, perhaps because of the pressures of a smaller market, but the first printrun was all you got.  So bookstores are smaller.  On the other hand, they are still, strictly, bookstores.  There are no cds, no coffee shops, no movies.  Just books, in clearly marked sections.

 

The books are, and this is a reflection of the national character, at least in terms of the people who CHOOSE to read, mostly non-fiction of a scholarly nature.  There were a lot of books I wanted, ranging from a comprehensive history of Portugal (almost impossible to get in the US) to fictionalized biographies of various Portuguese princesses.  Unfortunately I was with my dad, who had announced his intention to buy me anything I wanted.  Even more unfortunately, these books ran in the neighborhood of 40 Euros, which is daylight robbery.

 

When my dad asked me to find him a book I enjoyed, I was stumped.  Apparently, only our more turgid bestsellers make it here, including Dan Brown’s Opus (opuses?) which really shouldn’t sell that well in a Catholic Country.  I mean, people know that the Catholic church doesn’t have assassins, right?  (If they did, I’d be a nun, duh.)   There were also, disguised under historical covers, book after book of undead porn.  (Some of it very good undead porn, but not my dad’s cup of tea, and certainly not the sort of thing I should recommend to my dad.)   There were other bestsellers too and I ended up settling for recommending him a scholarly book on World War II and one of Phillipa Gregory’s historical books.  I probably would have recommended Raymond Feist, too, but I doubt my dad would “get” Fantasy.

 

The good news is that Science Fiction and Fantasy were shelved in the middle of the other fiction.  The bad news is that there was so little of it.

 

How does this relate to where we are, and what the ebooks are bringing?  Ebooks are unknown here.  I had to explain my kindle over and over and over again.  The funny thing is that once explained they take to the concept like ducks to water.  They want them.  Badly.

 

If my dad read English I would, right now, be leaving him my kindle.  As is, though, there is no Amazon pt selling translations of works.  And here I must ask, why not?  Surely I’m not the only writer who is fluent in two languages.  If we’re going to do this thing on our own, why not sell translations?  I wonder if Naked Reader would like a Portuguese translation of ATON?  The sales will be slow, but due to the lack of back list and limited selection, the market is wide open.  It will be slow only till e-readers catch on.  And I think I know someone who can do a French Translation, and I wonder if I can get a friend to translate into Japanese if I give him a cut of the action…

 

This is something we haven’t even started to think about, but we should.  Ebooks are by nature worldwide.  Oh, what brave new world…

 How do you think we should go about it? 

«crossposted at Mad Genius Club.»

7 thoughts on “Book Shopping In Portugal”

  1. Depending on the cut my wife might also do the Japanese translation.

    The book price thing sounds like Portugal has the same problem France has – legally mandated agency pricing for all books. Its nucking futs and means that it can frequently be cheaper to buy the English original of a work from Amazon.com than the French translation (even with the delivery charges).

    Is there, I wonder, a Brazilian amazon and kindle? if so one might imagine a load of gray imports via amazon.com.br

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  3. First, I’d like to thank you for these posts. I’m sure it can’t be a picnic to make them, but they provide stay-at-homes a wonderful window on the world.

    Second, from this remove, it appears that the whole Eurozone has a notional take on intellectual property, and one has to wonder what collateral effects that has on markets for books. It is, however, I suspect, a topic worth researching. If you retain e-rights to a book, can get it translated, can it be marketed from afar, as it were — even as Francis suggests, from a .br seller– on something like Create Space? Might be a fair, if minor, revenue stream for an enterprising author.

    M

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    1. Mark,
      Iºm doing — hopefully — some reporting for PJM starting tomorrow. I have found my camera and elections are this weekend. meanwhile here is a teaser from yesterdayºs headlines «Portuguese unemployment climbs;portuguese shoe industry canºt find workers» Ah, the miracles of Europe…

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  4. When I was discovering SF in the late 60’s the amount of SF available in stores was so scant I eventually resorted to getting publishers’ catalogs and ordering direct. Looking at the sizes of SF/F on display in bookstores today is heartwarming — or would be if I hadn’t figured out that the SF on offer was really about the same as when I first started buying. LOTS more Fantasy, most of it rather unappealing. It ain’t the number of books on display that matters, it’s the quality.

    I sympathize with the dismay over inability to find a comprehensive history of Portugal; my family had a similar reaction in an Ontario bookstore when we were unable to buy a history of Canada. I wonder what the results of a survey of countries that publish their histories might reveal; are America and Britain unusually self-absorbed while Canada and Portugal the norm, or is it t’other way ’round? What does it mean for a nation to care or not about its history?

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