Pilar Reyes tops the list of the world's most influential editors in Spanish. She is Colombian from Bogotá and is endowed with an elegance in a low voice and an implacable talent. She began working as a fellow at the Alfaguara delegation in her country. In 2009 he arrived to take over the publishing house in Spain and today, with Penguin Random House Mondadori as a mothership, he leads the editorial division of the group dedicated to literature, from fiction and essay.

Editing today has new ingredients, not just smell. Social networks impose a new relationship with reading. How do you assume these changes? The great digital revolution was not a matter of format, as initially stated, but the way in which books communicate, the way in which publishers find authors and the way in which readers access the books. There is the profound change. This modifies deep elements of the root of editorial work. Much of the information that reaches the reader about a book is done digitally. That implies changing many things of our trade. Today we handle very valuable information: we know what readers read to an author, what other books they are interested in, what newspapers they read, what age range they are ... No longer only the smell is worth. Today the analysis is imposed, even for a universe as unpredictable as the literary one. We handle a subject that the reader does not know what he wants. That's why we are building taste with every book we release. It is exciting. Does it make sense that the market offers in Spain 90,000 titles a year? The world of publishing is an industry and has the dynamics of a consumer good. In other countries you don't think so much about the quantity. It is very good news that a cultural asset such as the book maintains such a great offer. The book is the support of our culture and a reflection of the desires of our society. But to know where the quality is, the role of cultural supplements and the institutions that set criteria is necessary. It is the way that this great offer has reception channels. Therefore, literary criticism is fundamental. We must not avoid the inconvenience of judging. How much does the industry impose on literature? Even on the literary side we are a reflection and metaphor of the time in which we work. The great success of the black novel, for example, has an explanation: for a while, literature moved away from telling a story. Formal games can interest a very particular audience, but you cannot forget that the purpose is to tell even history. An editor has to be totally sponge with respect to the times. Without forgetting that the catalog of an editorial is essential to generate an ecosystem where one book is linked to another, where one reading invites another. A book is not new because you publish it in 2019, but because it is read with admiration. Don Quixote is a new book for those who read it for the first time. Is the audiobook a reading offer? Any format is a proposal to read and search for different types of readers. There are those who find silent reading less suggestive and listening is easier. In Spain now begins to have a boom. We talk about a reading experience. And our interest is to take advantage of all that technology allows us to reach a greater number of readers. What I don't know is what will happen when the generation that has grown up with the internet starts writing. What do you expect of that? I think there will be a second moment in which that gets involved in the kind of aesthetic proposal that future writers make. Of course we can not know. Are there symptoms? Yes. For example, in the descriptions. The description in a novel today is not the same as in a text 50 years ago. Once I talked about this with Javier Marías and he argued that it doesn't make much sense to describe today an airport, which is a spatial reference for everyone. The world is watching the same television series, and it shows that there are more and more common references. That demands a greater originality of approach, a very personal look that is irreplaceable for a reader. Was the twentieth century that of the readers and the XXI, that of consumers? It is inevitable for an editor to think of books that seem good and books I can sell. I like Roger Chartier's phrase about what it is to edit: make a manuscript a book and a book a consumer good. Evading the market problem is not true. Even a small publisher must be sensitized to go out and look for readers for a book. Be 500 or 5,000. Now, I keep working with the idea that I prefer the books I choose to be sold rather than choosing books just to sell. And we cannot forget that literature, the time of literature, has a lot of competition. Reading times have shifted through television series. Therefore, to select a book you must be aware that it is very good. Every time we have less quality time and, therefore, less moments of enjoyment of culture. Are we at the beginning or end of something? We are at the end of something while we see the new born. The editors of my generation are in a complex and exciting hinge. There are no certainties anymore. The political and philosophical book regains the interest of readers. There I think there is a very strong urgent book slope. Helping people think about the present tense will be a huge responsibility.

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