Happy ‘Bibliodiversity Day’

Although more widely celebrated in French– and Spanish-language publishing circles, Bibliodiversity Day — or El Día B — is a day to encourage the growth of smaller and environment-specific book trends (not the sparrow and the blue shark, but the dugong and broad-snouted caiman). In the words of bookstore owner and editor Guido Indij, it’s also “to counter the North-South current in the spread of books and ideas and to push for counterbalance, from South to North, as well as across the South”:

In an editorial Indij wrote for Publishing Perspectives two years ago, Indij said that — echoing biodiversity — bibliodiversity “seeks to guarantee the diversity of editorial offerings available to readers.”

Continuing with the biological metaphor, Indij wrote: “Bibliodiversity is currently threatened by overproduction, corporate consolidation in the publishing industry and the growth of new technologies that seem to benefit the dominance of a few big publishing groups and their quest for high profits.”

The International “B Day” was, according to Indij, launched on September 21 2011; really, the “bibliodiversity” metaphor is hard to resist. Further, from Indij:

We chose the date September 21st for symbolic reasons. September 21st is the first day of Spring in the Southern Hemisphere. Spring evokes mild weather, variety, color contrast, vigor, flowering, re-greening, transition, love, perfume, an announcement for what is new.

The movement seems to privelege print over electronic forms (see this year’s video), but also multilinguality: