Back in the day, in the capital of North East Mexico, a city of no less than 3.5 million people, there was a distinct lack of bookshops. There were a few dusty second-hand bookshops on Calle Washington in the city centre: Librerías Cerda et al. And then there was Librería Castillo, in the shopping centre near my house, selling mostly Paulo Coelho and cookbooks, as well as a few bookshops dedicated exclusively to school textbooks. Growing up, this is what I had access to. There was no way to order books online. If you were lucky enough to be able to travel 900 km to Mexico City, then you could get anything you wanted. Otherwise, you had to wait for the yearly book festival, and gorge yourself. Spend all of your savings buying everything you found remotely interesting, making sure you had at least enough to keep you going for a whole other year. A stall dedicated to each publisher/bookseller. A massive conference hall full of books, spilling out into the corridors. Free to attend with free readings and events. It was paradise for one whole week every autumn.
In university, we had to read most of our books from the photocopy of the photocopy that our professor smuggled back from communist Russia. Or at least that's what it felt like. We even had our favourite photocopy shop, called Tecnocopias. They were so well organised that they had all our recurring orders on file: Bakhtin, Margarita Dalton, Foucault, the Russian formalists, María Luisa Puga, Deleuze & Guatarri, Hélène Cixous, Josefina Vicens, Susan Sontag, or even classics like Homer or Unamuno or Flaubert or Cervantes or the odd Icelandic saga here and there, ready to be photocopied to order. Most of the time, the front cover and the page with the copyright information were not included. We had no idea in what year it was originally printed or who had published or translated this stuff. It didn't matter. They had failed us. Half an hour's wait and about 100-200 pesos (depending on the length of the book) gave you a heavy folder full of bond paper; optional spiral binding and plastic covers for an additional fee. I always bought my books unbound. That way I could carry around only the chapter I was reading, or put the chapters in the order I required, or make my own tailor-made anthologies. I still have a few crates of these precious photocopy-books in storage somewhere. I wonder how many royalties these authors and translators lost because we had no bookshops? And who the heck cares? How many people went out of business because of us? What would copyright legislators have expected us to do? They probably would have preferred us to not study at all.
Was there another way? Probably. Some entrepreneurial student could have set up a small publishing house and re-printed all these titles, or the photocopy shop could have paid royalties to the authors (though they were selling at the cost of just ink and paper), or somebody could have set up a small distributor and ordered in the titles, if the reading lists could have been made available a year in advance... Did we have the time or money or knowledge to figure all this out? No.
Plenty of bookshops have since opened in Monterrey, and I'm sure a lot of these titles are now available to buy legitimately. But what about the rarities, the out-of-print, the obscure, the highly specialized? Surely these deserved to be photocopied again and again, or in modern terms, distributed online in electronic versions, for free. Funded not by the market forces or by the nearly empty pockets of students, but by the government. And the in-print, readily available should also be available electronically to people who can't afford it, so that no student in any country has to work 20+ hours a week while studying just to be able to afford to buy the books they need to read.
I am so happy that we broke all the rules. I hadn't realized how anarchist and DIY we had to be to earn our degrees. I hope many more students in universities in remote or not-so-remote communities around the world are doing the same. Love books? Then love piracy. There is no other way for culture to spread at the speed it's supposed to. Buying books legitimately is only for wealthy, first world countries who step on the heads of "underdeveloped" nations, mess with their civil wars, impose unpayable debts, and steal all their oil. Why should they have the right to hinder the "illegitimate" distribution of ebooks as well?
In university, we had to read most of our books from the photocopy of the photocopy that our professor smuggled back from communist Russia. Or at least that's what it felt like. We even had our favourite photocopy shop, called Tecnocopias. They were so well organised that they had all our recurring orders on file: Bakhtin, Margarita Dalton, Foucault, the Russian formalists, María Luisa Puga, Deleuze & Guatarri, Hélène Cixous, Josefina Vicens, Susan Sontag, or even classics like Homer or Unamuno or Flaubert or Cervantes or the odd Icelandic saga here and there, ready to be photocopied to order. Most of the time, the front cover and the page with the copyright information were not included. We had no idea in what year it was originally printed or who had published or translated this stuff. It didn't matter. They had failed us. Half an hour's wait and about 100-200 pesos (depending on the length of the book) gave you a heavy folder full of bond paper; optional spiral binding and plastic covers for an additional fee. I always bought my books unbound. That way I could carry around only the chapter I was reading, or put the chapters in the order I required, or make my own tailor-made anthologies. I still have a few crates of these precious photocopy-books in storage somewhere. I wonder how many royalties these authors and translators lost because we had no bookshops? And who the heck cares? How many people went out of business because of us? What would copyright legislators have expected us to do? They probably would have preferred us to not study at all.
Was there another way? Probably. Some entrepreneurial student could have set up a small publishing house and re-printed all these titles, or the photocopy shop could have paid royalties to the authors (though they were selling at the cost of just ink and paper), or somebody could have set up a small distributor and ordered in the titles, if the reading lists could have been made available a year in advance... Did we have the time or money or knowledge to figure all this out? No.
Plenty of bookshops have since opened in Monterrey, and I'm sure a lot of these titles are now available to buy legitimately. But what about the rarities, the out-of-print, the obscure, the highly specialized? Surely these deserved to be photocopied again and again, or in modern terms, distributed online in electronic versions, for free. Funded not by the market forces or by the nearly empty pockets of students, but by the government. And the in-print, readily available should also be available electronically to people who can't afford it, so that no student in any country has to work 20+ hours a week while studying just to be able to afford to buy the books they need to read.
I am so happy that we broke all the rules. I hadn't realized how anarchist and DIY we had to be to earn our degrees. I hope many more students in universities in remote or not-so-remote communities around the world are doing the same. Love books? Then love piracy. There is no other way for culture to spread at the speed it's supposed to. Buying books legitimately is only for wealthy, first world countries who step on the heads of "underdeveloped" nations, mess with their civil wars, impose unpayable debts, and steal all their oil. Why should they have the right to hinder the "illegitimate" distribution of ebooks as well?
Oh, recuerdo esos días... Y recuerdo cómo, una vez y como por arte de magia, conseguí una edición de un libro de mi infancia que el tiempo y el moho habían destruido al no estar yo viviendo más en casa de mis padres... "Novelas y Cuentos", una antología de Alexei Tolstoy. Definitivamente, ahora vivimos una época interesante gracias a la WWW, pero un libro siempre será un libro. Algo tangible, hecho por manos humanas, que ocupa un lugar físico y... mucho más. Encontré parte de mi infancia en una librería de viejo, la memoria me falla, pero creo que tenía el nombre de una diosa griega... Tengo años de no pararme por MTY. ¿Atenea?
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