For the past few years, the EPF has been holding regular meetings of its Latin American offshoot, the EPF-LatAm, during the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico. Working closely with the IPA member, the Grupo Iberoamericano de Editores (GIE), EPF-LatAm also held a meeting during Buenos Aires Book Fair last year, and last month on 19 April) it called another meeting at the Feria Internacional del Libro de Bogotá (FILBo) in Colombia.
In attendance were many educational publishers from Central and South America, as well as a strong IPA delegation comprising IPA Vice President Hugo Setzer, the EPF’s Vice Chair Jaume Vicens, former IPA President Ana María Cabanellas, and IPA Secretary General José Borghino.
The issues discussed were, in the main, very similar to those that concern educational publishers all around the world: digitalisation, government interference in educational publishing, piracy and the threat of broadened copyright exceptions and limitations. What sets the Latin American market apart, however, is the high level of government investment and control in the educational sector and the lack of cross-border coordination among educational publishers — something that the EPF was set up to address when it was created in 2009. The meeting included a presentation on viral marketing in educational publishing by Jaume Vicens and an address from Geidy Lung, Senior Counsellor at WIPO, on the implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty.
The publishers present agreed to further consolidate the EPF-LatAm with a second meeting this year during the Guadalajara Book Fair around the last weekend in November.
Any educational publishers from Central or South America who want to be informed and updated about the EPF-LatAm are encouraged to email IPA at borghino@internationalpublishers.org