Online Marketplace Sales Climb in Argentina as Bookshops Struggle
Book sales through Mercado Libre, the online marketplace founded in Buenos Aires in 1999, grew 23% between January and August 2026, reaching 3.2 million copies. That is up from 2.6 million in the same period a year earlier, according to Publishing Perspectives.
The figures come from an analysis by Germán Echeverría, managing partner and director of Editorial Autores de Argentina, a self-publishing platform. He based his work on the monthly sales reports that Mercado Libre makes available to sellers. The company operates in 18 countries.
The growth is spread across many more sellers. Listings that made at least one sale, meaning individual product pages that sold a copy, rose 40% year on year to 194,000 in August. Active book sellers on the platform increased by 20%, and average sales per seller grew 16% in volume.
Sales are not concentrated in a few hit titles. The 100 bestselling listings accounted for just 3.8% of all copies sold.
Bookshops have felt the change. In September, the Federación Argentina de Librerías, Papelerías y Afines (FALPA), a federation of bookshops and stationery stores, declared a state of emergency. It warned that the country's roughly 1,200 independent bookstores were struggling. Ecequiel Leder Kremer of Buenos Aires bookstore Hernández estimated that Mercado Libre's share of the market grew from 36% in 2022 to more than 50% in 2025.
Bookshops operate on thin margins. Distributors and retailers in Argentina typically keep 45% to 55% of a book's cover price, the printed price on the jacket. Roughly 30% of books delivered to bookstores are eventually returned, meaning unsold copies go back to the publisher. A separate Publishing Perspectives report from March 2026 put Mercado Libre's commission on book sales at 13.5%, the fee the platform takes from each sale.
Put simply, a marketplace takes a smaller cut per book, skips the shop counter and reaches buyers in every corner of the country. Bookshops keep the cost of rent, staff and shelf space, and they still need to sell through their stock before it comes back to them unsold.
The analysis is a snapshot of eight months of sales. What it does show is where many Argentine readers are now buying their books: online, from a wide range of sellers, one parcel at a time.
