Every so often, the Parque Cerro Verde Shopping Mall—one of the newest and largest in Caracas, located in the southeastern hills—has hosted several book and reading festivals. But despite the packed stands, some visitors leave the mall the same way they came in: without even a book in hand.
The book sector has been one that has shrunk the most in size over the last 15 years. In fact, the Venezuelan Book Chamber (Cavelibro), which brings together bookstores, publishers, and book distributors, has seen its membership shrink by 70%, according to Julio Mazparrote, the association’s president.
Unlike other countries, where services like Amazon and digitalization have impacted the sector, the economic context is one of the factors that best explains this dynamic: during the oil boom of the 2000s, the sector prospered thanks to growing consumption. However, when the economy began to contract a decade ago, household budgets began to prioritize basic needs like food, displacing other areas such as culture, which severely affected books.
The landslide of bookstores, distributors and printing presses
When this economic impact—which hit the sector hard, particularly between 2013 and 2020—overlapped with the significant reduction in demand due to the migration of millions of Venezuelans during the same period, the expansion of books in digital formats, and the subsequent rise of digital piracy, the Venezuelan publishing sector saw its domestic market collapse and lost much of its dynamism.
Venezuela is no longer the prominent country in the region where state-owned publishing houses like Ayacucho and Monte Ávila or where multinationals like Planeta and Ediciones B –which then fled the country during the crisis – flourished. Nor is it the country it was at the beginning of the century, when it was impossible to walk through Altamira Square during book fairs due to the number of people who came—and who did take books home.
Nacho and Las Novedades were some of the bookstore chains that had stands at these fairs, but they have now disappeared from the capital, with Nacho closing its 38 branches and Las Novedades closing its 10. In fact, of the large chains that existed in Caracas, only Tecni-Ciencia Libros remains today, although it too has significantly reduced its size. “Since we all had a very bad time starting in 2012 –the worst was 2016 and 2017– [and after all those years] we went from having 38 stores to nine stores,” says Rosa Higuera, administrator of Tecni-Ciencia Libros.
And it’s not just the chains; a large part of independent bookstores, with a few exceptions, have suffered similar fates: Librería Estudios, Lugar Común, Muchos Libros, Suma, Noctua, and many others have closed their doors. On a larger scale, ninety bookstores closed between 2013 and 2023 in Caracas alone, with other cities and regions facing even more critical situations.
The blow isn’t limited to bookstores. At the beginning of the new century, the sector was led by distributors and importers. However, today, “the vast majority [of the companies that remain] only provide publishing services in the country, and some are importing books from abroad, fighting hard against piracy and bringing in limited book offerings (…) under conditions that aren’t ideal for the market,” says Mazparrote.
Similarly, according to data from Cavelibro, printing presses are currently operating at between 10% and 20% of their capacity, sustaining themselves thanks to textbooks requested by private schools. Viewed another way, between 80% and 90% of installed capacity is unused.
And a lower availability of establishments and publishing houses may correspond to less reading. In fact, according to the latest study by the Regional Center for the Promotion of Books in Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLALC), which included Venezuela, on average, fewer than two books per person were read per year in the country; in contrast, countries like Argentina and Chile read more than four.
This is not a minor shortcoming, as economic growth tends to go hand in hand with the level of human capital development. After all, an improvement in the quantity and quality of a country’s professionals leads to increases in its aggregate productivity levels and boosts that country’s production and income. Conversely, when human capital stagnates, economic performance is limited.
The unexpected rebirth of the Venezuelan book world
However, despite the regional contrasts and challenging domestic circumstances, Venezuela has not forgotten how to read. In fact, the book sector has been growing in recent years, and the key behind the upswing has been reinventing itself and adapting to the market, according to Mazparrote.
For example, Tecni-Ciencia Libros has managed to survive thanks to a diversification of its offering —which now also includes stationery and toy sales— while other iconic Caracas bookstores such as La Gran Pulpería del Libro Venezolano, Libroria, or El Buscón, to name a few, have also been operating, increasingly holding activities such as fairs and other cultural events outside of conventional book sales.
For Katyna Henríquez Consalvi, manager of the El Buscón Bookstore, located in Trasnocho Cultural on the Paseo Las Mercedes shopping mall, some of the keys to staying afloat for more than 20 years have been Henríquez’s own experience in the trade, the sense of commitment they have with Venezuelan readers, and the initial concept of the business model: “We started as a secondhand bookstore – rare books, first editions, out-of-print books, and primarily Venezuelan bibliography,” she says, “we were able to overcome [the difficulties of the Venezuelan context] because we didn’t depend on the international distribution labels that left the country many years ago.”
In fact, this latter aspect allowed El Buscón to stock more books from the libraries of families and individuals who emigrated, as other bookstores disappeared. “Families continually come to El Buscón, seeking not only to sell their books, but above all to leave their libraries, which are part of their lives, in the hands of professionals who can give them a warm welcome,” says Henríquez Consalvi.
Another unexpected revival has been that of the Alejandría Bookstore, which, after announcing its closure in mid-2022, reopened its doors in August 2023. “We didn’t just sell books; we also provided guidance to readers, and that is the key to our success,” said César García Camperos, the bookstore’s owner, in a press release.
But the upturn is most noticeable at the independent level. In recent years, new bookstores have recently opened in the country—such as El Cuervo in El Hatillo and The Book Shop in Las Mercedes, both in Caracas. “Our sales figures have improved compared to last year,” says Juan Guerrero, who, along with his partner, Victoria Monsalve, runs La Trastienda Literaria, a digital bookstore from Maracay that ships to all of Venezuela and other countries.
In the absence of physical spaces, the success of a digital bookstore depends on the loyalty of its community —especially on Instagram— on matching the available offering with customer requests, and on ensuring customer trust. This, in turn, requires providing various facilities —for example, including Cashea-style BNPL payment plans— or allowing the use of various payment methods in bolivars and foreign currencies, in addition to studying reader preferences.
According to Alexander Urrieta, who runs the digital bookstore Liber Ludens from Caracas, Venezuelan readers have turned to texts that “have been able to sell themselves as practical recipes for living,” for example, self-help, New Age, and Stoicism. Also, “there is a population, especially young people, who are very concerned about what is happening in the country, who want to find their own national identity and make requests about it,” especially in history and philosophy, says Guerrero, a trend that Henríquez Consalvi also observes at the El Buscón bookstore.
Economy of a shipwreck
But despite the recent rebound, the state of the economy remains one of the biggest challenges to further growth: “It’s not easy for many people to spend $20, $30, or $40 on a book,” says Urrieta, who also mentions that, while sales are growing compared to last year, there have been critical months where practically nothing is sold.
The uncertainty of purchasing power is also reflected in book sales, limiting the opening of new establishments and the expansion of existing ones. Few are willing to make investments without more concrete guarantees of significant success. This has hampered the circulation of new international books and encouraged the secondhand market, such as the one found under the Fuerzas Armadas Bridge, for example. “However, since secondhand is about surviving shipwrecks, it’s an economy that neither harms nor benefits anyone; (…) it may work for a while, but sadly, an industry cannot grow by taking this contingency as its only alternative for profit and promotion,” Urrieta mentions.
Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño once said that books have two main functions: to take us to other worlds and to serve as mirrors. In Venezuela’s case, the book sector also serves as a mirror for others: the economic crisis of previous years redefined its size and dynamics, and although growth is palpable with sufficient innovation, its ceiling is also quite visible.
