A few days ago, Núria Cabutí, the CEO of the Penguin Random House publishing group, put on her helmet to lay the first stone of the new distribution center in Cerdanyola del Vallès, which represents an investment of 36 million euros and will be operational at early 2025. In his office on Travessera de Gràcia, he directs the group's activities in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, which has 1,600 workers around the world, 650 of them in Spain, 80% in Catalonia. Ella Cabutí receives this newspaper to comment on current events in the sector.
When the works are finished, will the reader be able to get the books they order more quickly?
Yes. The objective of this large investment is to offer even better service at the point of sale. Now we are in five locations in the Barcelona area, including the Pallejà facilities that we had in 1988, when we were Plaza and Janés. We are talking about many years ago, many things have happened.
Publishers are increasingly using artificial intelligence, I have read that for the writing of flaps, for example...
At the level of editorial processes, the use of AI will improve, that is, for raw writing, but in the end there will always have to be a human being correcting everything and giving it shape.
You are surely investigating the issue, from your headquarters in New York...
We are looking at how to incorporate artificial intelligence into processes, but above all right now what we are asking is that intellectual property be respected in the use of AI. We support intellectual property and demand total transparency, that it be known what type of sources are being used to provide content to the AI and that, if they have copyright, they are remunerated. This is the big topic right now.
That Orwellian nightmare of a book written entirely by a machine...
Well, there already are. But we think that human creativity is not going to be replaced by artificial intelligence and what adds value to a publishing house is that creativity. Copying is something that machines will surely do well, but in the end what we want are new things, and only human beings have that.
How many books will they have in the new warehouse?
We estimate that we will be able to service about 130,000 books a day, in total we are talking about 35 million books a year. From there we will serve the 1,500 points of sale that we serve directly in Spain and we will also provide service to exports.
Those are figures for the movement of copies, and it will also be a warehouse, right?
Yes, of our entire catalogue, there are now 18.4 million copies of our 20,000 titles, adding all the publishers in Catalan, Spanish, all the latest acquisitions and those to come.
“And those that come”…
Whatever may come.
Will they come or won't they come?
Well, let's see, we are always looking at what opportunities there are in the market and, above all, if the fit of that publisher can really make sense within our group, if it is a complementary catalog, if it reaches another type of audience. Now we have 60 publishing labels, we have grown a lot and finding complementary catalogs is becoming more complicated, but if the possibility exists, why not? Our shareholder, Bertelsmann, has great confidence in the Hispanic market, which is growing, there is all of Latin America, and there is the United States. The Hispanic population in the US is 20%, despite the fact that the Spanish-language publishing market is only 1%. There is a future there.
The other day a study came out that said that book sales continued to rise, but that they were selling a little less. That means that the price of the book goes up...
It is true that the price of books has risen, but the costs of paper have increased very significantly. In 2022 they grew between 20 and 60 percent, depending on the type of paper. This year they are more stable. There is an increase in production costs, a small part of which has been transferred to the price of the book, but not in the same proportion.
What trends are detected?
The segment that has grown the most in recent years has been children's and youth reading, due to several factors. One has been the emergence of the entire graphic novel part and, among them, manga; and also all these book phenomena related to social networks, TikTok, Wattpad... And another segment that is growing is the audiobook, which has been operating in the Hispanic market in the United States for a long time and is just getting started here.
What else do they detect?
In recent years, there has been a dominance of Spanish-language authors. Now half of everything we publish are authors in the original language, especially in Spanish, from Spain, Argentina, Mexico... and the other half are translations from foreign languages. Before there were more translations.
There was a time when there was a lot of talk about whether Penguin Random House would surpass the turnover of its great rival, the market-leading group, Planeta. Are they closer to that?
We have already achieved it. We are leaders in the entire Hispanic market. We have grown a lot among the 600 million Spanish speakers, we are in all Latin American markets.
Are you the first publisher in Spanish in the world?
Yes, in what we call general editions, the trade, the bookstore, not in textbooks, for example, which we do not touch. And in Catalan we are also growing a lot.
There they have more room to grow.
Yes, so far this year we have grown 36%.
What does it mean to be a leader, how much do you sell?
We have had 351 million euros of net sales in 2022.
And the year before?
242 million, that's a lot of growth. I remember that in 2000 we were selling 10.5 million.
