AT THE Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL), the largest Spanish-language publishing event, held a few weeks ago in Guadalajara, in Mexico, an eager teenager cadged your correspondent's badge at the exit. That young people might want to sneak into book fairs would be the stuff of dreams in many countries, where competition from other media is pushing books aside. But as FIL demonstrates with more than 500,000 visitors, up by 7% from 2006, Spanish-language publishers, and readers, have much to celebrate.

The market for books in Spanish is thought to be the second-largest in the world. It is the biggest for books in translation, which account for about a fifth of the 120,000 Spanish titles published each year. With sales up by 7.5% in 2005—growth is strongest in Argentina, Mexico and Colombia—it is expanding faster than many other book markets. Since many of the world's 400m Spanish-speakers live in developing countries, it has great potential: literacy rates are high and incomes are rising. (Ibero-American publishing, which also includes books in Portuguese, is worth about $6 billion a year.)

Yet the industry has historically done a poor job of getting books to readers. In the 1970s a period of repression and economic crisis in Latin America concentrated Spanish-language publishing in Spain, where publishers were indifferent to Latin American markets. As a result, Spanish readers have for years had far broader access to Latin American works than have Latin Americans—who have also had little chance to buy books by foreign authors.

Now this is changing. In the past five years big international publishers such as Planeta, Santillana and Random House Mondadori have bought local imprints throughout the Spanish-speaking world. This lets them market books worldwide while selling at local prices, and scout for promising writers. Deals that offer rights across several regions are becoming more common. And although the number of titles published in Spain has declined slightly for the past few years, it is growing strongly in Latin America. Five Latin American countries now have higher rates of book readership than Spain.

Even so, distribution in Latin America remains difficult. As if to underscore this, a container of books was stolen on the way to Guadalajara. Counterfeits are also a problem for publishers. Riccardo Cavallero, boss at Random House Mondadori, the leader in Spanish-language paperbacks, says that in Chile sales of pirated books can equal those of legitimate copies.

There is also a wide variation between Spanish-language markets. Mexico has few bookshops—one for every 82,000 people, or an eighth of the number in Spain. And the enthusiasm at Guadalajara notwithstanding, the industry frets that readers are scarce or, sniffily, that they prefer self-help books to more elevated fiction.

Novelists and poets in Latin America are often prominent public intellectuals. In Mexico writers can still benefit from generous tax breaks, stipends and government appointments. “The idea is that culture generates the nation,” says Álvaro Enrigue, a novelist. This system may produce fine literature, but the resulting work does not always have broad appeal: a well-received Mexican novel may sell only 5,000 copies worldwide, though political non-fiction can sell 100,000 and be very influential.

Things are better in Argentina, by contrast. It has a bookshop for every 48,000 people, more than 2,000 public libraries, and avid readers. Its publishers produce nearly eight times as many titles as Mexico's, even with less than half the population. The economic crisis six years ago boosted local publishing by making imported books prohibitively expensive. Costs remain low there, and many companies—such as Planeta, which publishes the Spanish translations of “Harry Potter”—print books in Argentina for distribution abroad. The biggest hurdle now, says Daniel Divinsky, who publishes “Mafalda”, a children's title that has sold more than 20m copies since the 1970s, is that Argentina's creaking printing infrastructure is running at maximum capacity.

In some respects, the Spanish-language market is coming to resemble publishing in English. There has not been a strong tradition of blockbusters in Spanish, says Antonia Kerrigan, a literary agent based in Barcelona, but last year “La Catedral del Mar”, a first novel, sold 1.5m copies, making it Europe's leading seller and one of the top five in the world. There is also new interest in foreign translations of books written in Spanish. Gabriel García Márquez's “Love in the Time of Cholera” was recently a bestseller in America thanks to a Hollywood film, and he was treated like a rock star at FIL. He is not alone: in 2006 Javier Sierra's “The Secret Supper” also sold well in English.

Nonetheless, Spanish-language publishing remains structurally distinct: cut-price online booksellers, for example, have not had much impact, since rules in Spain and Argentina limit discounts on books. And in Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, the largest publisher, is state-owned and has a monopoly on the lucrative textbook market. But once a book has made it into a reader's hands, such concerns do not much matter. “All these things are unimportant,” says Ms Kerrigan. “You either write well, or you don't.”
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