Oligopolies

It is appreciated the latest article by Carlota Gurt in this same newspaper on the concentration of ownership in the publishing sector. The debate it raises about the big, the small, the independent, the oligopolies and Catalan culture is so important that it is good to start it and it would be good to do it calmly and in person. Because it is necessary, as we can certainly learn from it and, above all, to reach rigorous conclusions that allow us to work for an ambitious culture with a future.

Paramount, a company owned by Larry Ellison70 years after the events that Gurt mentions in her article, Paramount, a company owned by Larry Ellison, an intimate friend of Donald Trump, has bought Warner Bros for 100 billion euros with the direct help of the President of the United States to politically control CNN, among other channels, and has done so with money from the Persian Gulf monarchies, seriously endangering diversity and freedom of expression in the audiovisual field on a global scale.

Meanwhile, Twitter has been bought by Elon Musk for 40 billion dollars with the stated goal of changing the outcome of the elections in the United States and contributing to the spread of the far-right.

At the same time, Amazon invested more than 320 billion euros in Europe, which has allowed it to invoice billions in book sales, in addition to destroying the commercial fabric and especially many bookstores throughout Europe.

The sum of millions, with these three business operations, amounts to 460 billion, which is the entire GDP of Catalonia, the Valencian Country, and the Balearic Islands in 2025. This is the battle of the oligopolies that, indeed, impacts our culture: the 460 billion – which, on the other hand, are just an example – that are ending diversity, plurality, creativity, individual and collective initiative, here and around the world; this is the problem and not the 25 million that Abacus invoices.

In the same period, the large publishing groups that control the market in the Spanish state –Planeta (2,000 million turnover) and Penguin Random House Mondadori (4,000 million) which have almost 50% of the market–, have reduced the quota of Catalan while, simultaneously, they have been buying the most emblematic Catalan-language publishing houses: 62, Pòrtic, La Campana, Periscopi, La Magrana…

And all this, this global clampdown with a clear local impact, has caused the Catalan publishing world today to be poorer, more precarious, to pay creators, translators, and workers less, for independent publishing houses and independent bookstores to have a fair economic balance and not make the investments they need. When Carlota Gurt complains that tariffs are not being applied, or when she denounced in a previous article that booksellers were not paying her for presentations, it is about this, about the fragility in which cultural industries live in a country with a minority language gripped by the challenges posed by globalization and real oligopolies.

And this is the challenge we face from Abacus. To help solve the equation that globalization and business concentration in the field of content are currently posing to us. Nothing more and nothing less. It may be an impossible challenge, but we believe in it and try with all our might. We are an institution that has the trust of a million cooperative members, created in 1968 by people who had maximum ambition in much more difficult times and who inspire us to work hard to provide Catalan culture and language with more business and economic muscle.

This is why we work to bring together the maximum talent around our cooperative project, preserving the personality and independence of each project. The editors who have come from La Galera, Ara Llibres, Arcàdia, Viena, Navona, La Bernat Metge, Univers know this, but also independent bookstores like 22 de Girona or Quart Creixent de Palma and others that are already working with us to improve the strength of their project and within a framework of total independence. We also do this in the audiovisual field by creating series, films, television programs, and also in the field of education, for example, by offering free extracurricular activities to thousands of children in the last year and looking at how we can be as useful as possible to the teachers of our country again.

Abacus is a small project (142 million total turnover) that wants to be big to serve Catalan culture in the context of globalization.

And we want to do it with a cooperative ownership model because we believe, and have believed for many years, in the power of society to build economic alternatives that make the world better.

Perhaps we are naive, perhaps we will not succeed, but I think we will agree that if we are to correct things, it is better to talk about them and accumulate energy to combat real monopolies.

It would be good to talk about it seriously. There is a desire to do so.