The following chapter focuses on the emergence of deluxe book publishers in Brazil, where the book industry is clearly more vulnerable to the fluctuations and crises of the global book market than it is in other regions of the world. This vulnerability will be explained primarily through the lenses of historical, economic, and social inequality, which present fundamental problems for the book industry. They lead, for example, to higher book prices, higher printing and paper costs, and unfavorable delivery networks. These are limitations that affect not only authors but also publishers as well as the book market in general. These contrasts can be most clearly observed in the early twenty-first century, when a phase of stability and growth in the book trade was disrupted by economic downturns. Prior to that, a new publishing phenomenon had emerged in Brazil: for the first time, prestige was associated with the consumption of books.

My considerations are based on two historical facts that cannot be ignored. First, since the early twenty-first century there has been a new organizational form in the Brazilian publishing industry, which was previously unknown. The international tendency to transform publishing houses into media companies and government policies to democratize access to education have greatly contributed to this shift. These policies have been undertaken since the end of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), but the first signs of success only came with the economic upswing and the investments in book production and distribution that took place under the governments of President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva (2002–2010) and President Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016). Although Brazil plays a role in the global economic system, its role in the academic and cultural production of immaterial goods, like books, remains marginal. Today, after a process of deindustrialization from the 1990s onward, Brazil has become a supplier of raw materials for the international market, and many of the books published in Brazil are printed in China.

The colonial past and the former opposition between the proprietors of enslaved workers and the enslaved themselves created a brutal concentration of wealth that is still evident today. This is illustrated by studies on income tax data, which have recently been published for the first time.