If It Happened In Venezuela, It Could Happen Here...

Found this link via The Bibliophile Stalker: Venezuela Strangles Book Imports, Bankrupting Bookstores And Publishers. An excerpt:

In bookstores all over Venezuela the bookshelves are emptying. Readers’ hunger for new and classic titles is as strong as it ever was, but a policy change that the government made over a year ago is gradually choking off the flow of imported books, which make up 80% of the market in Venezuela, resulting, naturally, in fewer and fewer books to sell.

It seemed like a minor bureaucratic change at the time: in March 2008, the government led by president Hugo Chávez downgraded the import status of books. Once listed as “essential goods”, all imported books would now require government certification, either demonstrating they were not produced domestically, or else not produced domestically in sufficient numbers. In practice, this means that for all titles they want to import, publishers or distributors have to submit an application describing the books in question and request that a share of foreign currency be allocated for their import. (In Venezuela, the government regulates the use of foreign currency for imports.) These applications are then reviewed by a government bureaucrat, who has the power to decide how many copies will be imported.

The decisions the government has made over the year that the law has been in force seems somewhat arbitrary. For example, the international bestseller The Secret could reasonably be expected to sell ten thousand copies or more, yet only several hundred were approved. What’s more, publishers must then wait six months to reapply to import additional copies — by which time demand may have dropped.

The result of this policy has been a catastrophic shortage of books.

Click here to read the whole article.

Get informed on what has been happening in the Philippines, then compare it with what has happened in Venezuela: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.