I noticed that the 2007 edition of the Buenos Aires book fair already has its Web site up: Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires. It will run from April 16 to May 7.

I’m already excited.

Book production

Buried under the professional section of the site is a page about book production in Argentina. More than 21,000 titles were registered with Argentina agency of the ISBN during 2005, a 15% increase over 2004. Unfortunately, the stats don’t differentiate between new titles and reprints. So, it’s unclear exactly how many new titles are published.

By calculating the numbers on the book fair site, then the average print run for a book in Argentina was 3,520 in 2005. In reality, I suspect that most books receive even fewer printings here.

As for the type of books, 29% are fiction, 27% in the social sciences and the remainder in various non-fiction categories.

What about translations?

A footnote reveals that 4% of the titles were translated into Spanish from another language. So, I calculated that number to be 852 books for 2005. That strikes me as a very low number. Of those titles, 48% were from English, 13% from French, another 13% from Japanese, and around 4% each from German, Italian, and Portuguese. Oddly, 8% of the translated titles were indicated as being translated from Spanish. Huh? Perhaps it’s regional translations, making a book more suitable for readers in Buenos Aires than, say, Madrid. I don’t know.

It doesn’t mention how many of those translated titles are fiction and non-fiction. That would be interesting to know.

And, after just a bit more research, I found more statistics about book production in Argentina. I don’t have time to analyze those now but will post a summary later.