Granta Winter 2009 Issue 109 [antikvár]

In March of last year, Rodrigo Rosales, the director of the Peruvian offices of the international publisher Planeta, got an urgent call from Madrid. Paulo Coelho's people were upset. It seems the Brazilian writer's latest novel, O vencedor está só (published in English as The Winner Stands Alone), had been seen on the streets of Lima in an unauthorized edition. Rosales was taken aback. Coelho is a steady bestseller in Peru (and everywhere) and any new tide by him is certain to be pirated almost immediately upon publication, but this one wasn't scheduled to be released until July. In fact, it hadn't even been officially translated into Spanish. Though book piracy exists all over Latin America and the developing world, any editor with international experience in the región will teil you that Peru's problem is both unique and profound. According to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, the local Publishing industry loses more money to piracy than any other South American country, with the exception of Brazil - whose economy is more than eight times the size of Peru's. A 2005 report commissioned by the Cámara Peruana del Libro (CPL), a national consortium of Publishing houses, distributors and booksellers, came to even more alarming conclusions: pirates were employing more people than formal publishers and booksellers, and their combined economic impact was estimated to be 52 million US dollars - or roughly equivalent to one hundred per cent of the legal industry's total earnings. The pirates operate in piain sight: vendors ply the streets of the capital, carrying heavy stacks of books as they drift through stopped traffic, or spreading a torn piece of blue plastic tarp on a sidewalk, laying their wares out hopefully for all to see. You can find them in front of high schools, institutes and government buildings, or wandering the aisles of the markets where most Limenos do their shopping. One Saturday, I came across a man selling pirated law texts (cloth-bound, official-looking copies so well made I had a hard time