BUENOS AIRES – A total of 1.2 million books under 800 titles are pirated in Argentina every year, costing publishers $10 million in annual losses, the Argentine Publishers Association, or CAP, said over the weekend.

This adds up to 5 percent of all copies published in the country, where the market for illegal book production and sales has surged in recent years.

The existence of pirated texts, which are cheaper, hurts publishers economically because it forces them to lower their prices by some 30 percent, the association said.

“It’s an overwhelming phenomenon. The 50 best-selling books are all pirated. From now on there will be tons more. What are most pirated are best sellers and they’re available for 30 percent less,” Rodolfo Blanco, president of the Anti-piracy Commission of the CAP, told the daily Clarin.

Over the last decade this phenomenon “has grown to limits that hurts the sector enormously,” Blanco said.

In some cases the book is copied from the original at a print shop, and in others, authentic books are stolen after they leave the printer’s.

“Sometimes the differences between an original and a fake are in the kind of paper used or in the way the covers are printed. Generally people who work in the sector can detect the fakes,” the vice president of the Fundacion El Libro (Book Foundation), Carlos Pazos, told Efe recently.

Last April the Alfaguara publishing house filed suit against a stall at the International Book Fair in Buenos Aires after detecting pirated copies there of the Crepusculo series (The Twilight Saga Collection) by Stephenie Meyer, whose novels are among the tops in sales.

Personnel from the publishing house responsible for marketing Meyer’s work in Spanish discovered the piracy right at the fair, one of the most important in Latin America. EFE