Among the many companies affected by last week’s DANA is Andana Editoriala Valencian stamp located in Picasent that has lost a good part of its fund due to water. “In a first estimate we are talking about about 110,000 copies,” he comments. Richard Perishead of the publishing house. This is 30 percent of the books they kept in a warehouse in Ribarroja, which has been devastated by the flood. “It is a warehouse with five floors, and half a meter of water, well, mud, entered and everything that was on that floor has been affected,” he explains. In his case, boxes and boxes of books that have become unusable. Replacing them, calculating that printing a copy costs about 4 euros, will mean an investment of more than 400,000 euros. A disaster, for a small publishing house, with a dozen workers and that publishes between twenty and twenty titles a year. “The last straw is that at the bottom were the books that have the most rotation: the ‘long seller’, the novelty or what is going to be released sooner.” The books that sell the best, in short.
«Our goal is to try to return to normality as soon as possible. We are hopeful that insurance will be able to take care of the reprints. We have everything inventoried and insured, we keep it up to date. There has also been a meeting of the Valencian editors with the Ministry of Culture and they are quite receptive to obtaining some type of help that could be used for these things. The important thing is to have financial muscle to endure,” says Peris, who sounds more or less optimistic on the other end of the phone. «We have spent days removing mud from our houses. My parents live in Algemesí and the first floor of their house flooded. They could have died. At the publishing house we have not lost anyone, and that is fortunate. In the end, you relativize it. Within gravity, we have put all this at the end. We are not yet aware of the economic consequences. Maybe in a month, when we see the figures, or that the aid has not arrived, we move on to the next phase. Now what we have thought about is saving ourselves as we can.
Andana is a modest publishing house whose offices are in Picasent, a town located in the upper area and where fortunately the water has not reached. It publishes illustrated and children’s books, and also has another imprint specialized in non-fiction, La Caja Books. Your editor is Raul Asenciowho has attended all this from Zaragoza, where he has lived for a few years. «I don’t want to put myself in the worst case, for now I prefer to think that everything has not been lost. It could be disastrous, because in that warehouse is the profit margin left on the books. If we throw away 2,000 copies of a book, a thousand go to the distributor, which is in Madrid [y con los esos libros a salvo]and another thousand remain in the warehouse to send press shipments, replenish what the distributor sells or to take them to fairs. It is in this surplus where the expenses of the book have been paid and are beginning to be profitable. If these books had been lost, it would be disastrous: many of them would have to be reissued without having covered the costs of the first printing,” Asencio assesses. «The cost of printing a run of 2,000 copies ranges between 4,000 and 7,000 euros, without counting other expenses such as salaries, layout, typographical correction…».
The worst thing about these days, according to the editor of La Caja Books, is the uncertainty. A week after DANA, they only know the global figures. Now it is their turn to take inventory of which specimens they have lost. Asencio is not sure that he will have the capacity to recover everything he has lost. The support from other publishers, however, “has been overwhelming,” he comments, such as that of entities and associations in the sector. But for now they are nothing more than messages of encouragement. More or less like the Ministry of Culture, which has not yet made public an assessment of damages in the cultural sector and this week has finally begun to meet with entities in the sector. On Tuesday, Ernest Urtasun He met with the Valencia publishing association and this Wednesday he spoke with the booksellers. «After meeting with the publishing sector, libraries, musical and film societies, today we continue analyzing the impact of DANA with bookstores, Fallas artists and performing and visual arts. Valencian culture can count on the Ministry of Culture for its reconstruction,” says Urtasun. We will see.
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