Market Focus: Inside the Hispanic Book Market
Strength in Numbers
If the U.S. Census Bureau projection holds true for 2010, the Hispanic population in the United States will have more than doubled since the 1990 figure of 22 million.
"The market for books in Spanish is not proportional to the population, and that has proved to be a disappointment to many publishers," says Larry Bennett, vice president of digital print media and world language materials at Charlotte, N.C.-based book distributor Baker & Taylor. "Many publishers looked at the more-than-50-percent growth of the Hispanic population between the 1990 census and the 2000 census, and said, 'Oh my goodness, there's a huge opportunity here.' And [publishers] were consequently surprised that the sales were not as robust as they thought. But having said that, there's still a robust market.