Coronavirus: In Spain, Publishers Weigh Crisis Management and Digital Capabilities

In the trade publishing sector, consultant Javier Celaya describes a damaging resistance to digital development, while Spanish educational publishers say they’ve embraced their capacities in the pandemic.

Spanish-Language Publishing’s ‘Lost Decade’

Those who heard publishing consultant Javier Celaya’s conversation this month (in Spanish) with digital publishing specialist Daniel Benchimol know that the publishing industry faces serious hurdles, even as it tries to start emerging from the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic with the rest of the market.

At this writing, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center‘s 7:32 a.m. update (1132 GMT) assigns 232,128 confirmed cases to Spain, giving it the second-largest caseload in the world, after that of the United States (1,012,583 cases).

The Spanish death toll in this update is 23,822.

Javier Celaya

And the Bilbao-based Celaya—whose Dosdoce consultancy is a mainstay of information on the Spanish markets for the industry—made the point in that discussion with Benchimol that the Latin American and Spanish markets have operated for a decade with “a very serious structural problem, which has not been resolved and which is further aggravated by this new health and economic crisis.”

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