Life Among the Pirates

A few weeks later, I was doing a reading at the library of one of Lima’s prisons. I’d brought a copy of my novel along, to donate to the collection, but to my surprise the inmates already had one. They were rather embarrassed about it, but eventually they agreed to show it to me. The cover looked a lot like the original, except that the title had been rendered in incongruously playful red bubble letters with white trim. It was printed on cheap white office paper and the photocopying wasn’t particularly well done: every few pages, a stray hair floated over the text, and some pages had been copied at an angle, so that my sentences slid towards the outside margin at a melancholy slant.

One of the inmates explained that he had received my book as a gift from the outside. He claimed he hadn’t known it was pirated.

I nodded as if I believed him.

‘Could you sign it?’ the prison librarian asked me.

I did, of course, and left the prison that day feeling as if I had accomplished something.

If there is a certain allure to book piracy, it is only because we imbue this business with the same qualities we project on to the book itself. We focus on what is being manufactured and sold, as opposed to the fundamentally illicit nature of the enterprise. There are many reasons for this, of course. As a cultural artefact, the book has undeniable power, and the idea of a poor, developing country with a robust informal publishing industry is, on some level, romantic: the pirate as cultural entrepreneur, a Robin Hood figure, stealing from elitist multinational publishers and taking books to the people. The myth is seductive and repeated often: book piracy in Peru, the story goes, responds to a hunger for knowledge in a country that throughout its history has been violently divided between a literate upper class and the poor, unlettered masses. Literacy grew dramatically through the last century – nearly sixty per cent of Peruvians were illiterate in 1940, compared with only 7.1 per cent in 2007 – and along with this progress came a desire for books and all they represent. Still, millions of rural Peruvians are monolingual speakers of indigenous languages, and remain politically and economically marginalized as a result. In a country divided by race, ethnicity and language, acquiring fluency and literacy in Spanish has often been seen as an important first step towards socio­economic advancement.

Still, original books remain a prohibitively expensive luxury item, out of reach for most of the population. There are vast swathes of the country with no formal bookstores. Iquitos, the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon, with nearly 400,000 residents, has only two, and had none as recently as 2007.Trujillo,the country’s third largest city, has only one. School libraries, if they exist at all, are usually nothing more than a few dozen mouldering titles of little literary or historical value. More often than not, the only significant collections are housed at private universities, where neither students nor faculty are permitted to roam the stacks, where checkout privileges are limited to twenty­four hours – that is, just long enough to photocopy (read ‘pirate’) a book and return it. Nor is this bleak situation confined to rural areas or the provinces. An estimated eighty­five to ninety per cent of books are sold in the Lima metropolitan area, but for a city of nearly nine million, there are relatively few formal bookstores, the majority concentrated in the upper­middle class districts of San Isidro and Miraflores. North Lima, for example, comprising eight districts of the Peruvian capital, home to roughly two million people and half the city’s middle class, has none. The wealthiest of these eight districts, Los Olivos, has a municipal library of only 1,500 most donated volumes, including, naturally, a few counterfeit editions. On a larger scale, the National Library suffers the same neglect. For some thirty years its acquisitions budget remained unchanged – zero – and it too relied on donations to build its collection.

Given this context, is it any wonder that books are pirated?You can lament the informality of it, you can call it stealing, you can bemoan the losses incurred by the publishing industry – but if you love to read, it’s difficult to deny the hopeful logic: if someone is selling books, someone must be buying them. And if someone’s buying them, someone must be reading them. And reading, especially in a country as poor as Peru – isn’t that a good thing?