ABSTRACT
The two countries of the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal and Spain, have a tradition of book production of more than 500 years. In Portugal, where the per capita income is very modest indeed compared to our European Economic Community partners, the publishing industry has not yet attained the importance it has in Spain. It should be remembered that Spanish is spoken, in Spain and in Latin America, by more than 300 million people, and Portuguese is the official language of about 150 million Portuguese, Brazilians and Africans of the former Portuguese possessions. This means that more than 20 Spanish-speaking countries and some seven Portuguese-speaking countries make up the potential market for the production of the Iberian Peninsula. Nevertheless, the historical similarities between Portuguese publishing and Spanish publishing, as exports owing to the divergent paths followed by the forms of colonization of the two Peninsular peoples, their poles of action and the peculiar forces that acted on them.
