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(Applause)

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A dream made true.

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You'll notice in my voice,
as soon as I calm down,

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that I have a somehow weird accent,
as I've lived in Spain for twelve years.

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Twelve years ago I went to Paris
for 15 days to receive a literary award

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and I met a Catalan girl there,
and I stayed to live with her.

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Back in Argentina I had a job, a house,
and no intentions of moving whatsoever.

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While in Spain I had nothing:
no house, no job, not even papers

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to get a house and a job.

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Even worse, after living
8-9 months in Spain

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only because I was in love,

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two horrible things happened in Argentina.
First came the 2001 crisis,

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4-5 presidents in one week
and social chaos.

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And, even worse, around the same time,
Racing won the soccer championship.

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I am a Racing fan. It's horrible seeing
your team champion for the first time

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while being away...

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Far away from your land,
but in my case, from my father,

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with whom we'd always thought

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we'd see this event,
if it ever happened, together.

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These two circumstances,
the economic crisis in Argentina

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and my team winning the title,
happened at the same time

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and taught me what I didn't have
the slightest idea could ever happen:

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that pain and party,

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tragedy and triumph are the same

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when you're away.

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Not being able to cry with your loved ones
when something horrible happens,

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or celebrate with your people
when something wonderful happens

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puts you immediately offside.

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As I was in Spain sad and alone,
I had the idea to create a blog

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and I started writing.

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I named that blog Orsai,

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that means in soccer jargon in Spanish
that you are offside, off the game,

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that you're not allowed to play.

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In those times I used the Internet
mainly to send emails

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and to chat with my friends from Mercedes.

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So what happened when I created
that blog was a huge surprise for me

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and I imagine it was so
for everyone else at the time.

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I started writing short stories,
sometimes as myself,

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or disguised as different characters;
a housewife, a seer, a princess.

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And little by little it started
to get crowded.

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People from weird countries: Honduras,
Nicaragua,from Spain or from here.

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And so Orsai turned into a kind
of involuntary community of readers.

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I did nothing to gather them, I mean,

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I didn't put banners in my blog saying:

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"Come in, feel comfortable,
generate a community".

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The only thing I did was
writing short stories,

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I also read the comments
the readers made to those tales

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and also, most of the time,
I chatted with them.

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When that community got even bigger
because of word of mouth,

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and specially became more fervent,

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some traditional companies
related to culture and media

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started to listen
to this babble of voices.

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"Look, there's a guy who writes
and people are there."

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And so my phone started ringing,

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they offered me to work with them.

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The publishing companies
proposed me to make books

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with the stories I wrote
for free on the Internet

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and the press invited me to write
columns in their newspapers,

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similar to the kind of stuff
I wrote on the Internet.

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I know this now, I didn't know back then.

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I think I made a rather serious mistake.

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I went to work with the industry,

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I ended the direct communication
with my readers

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and I let them put me intermediaries,
an agent, a publisher

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a manager, a content editor.

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All those people lined up
between me and my readers.

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The publishing companies also asked me,
for the publication of my first book,

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to take away all those free articles
from the Internet so they could sell them.

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The situation got a bit tense there
because I told them immediately

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I couldn't do such thing for
I had given those texts as presents,

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and I couldn't go house by house
asking every reader if, please,

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I could get the gift back
because now I wanted

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to sell it through white collar guys.

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But it became worse as books
and time went by,

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that permanent feeling
that the publishers were robbing me.

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One time they closed the sales
one of my pocketbooks.

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It's an anecdote I always tell
and I think it's descriptive.

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they stated to have sold about 900 copies
in Argentina of a pocketbook

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and I knew, because I'm a close friend
of a bookseller from Mercedes,

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one of the three bookstores in Mercedes,
I knew that 750 had been sold

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in a small bookstore

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of a town of Buenos Aires province.

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And it wasn't just the feeling
of being robbed at gunpoint,

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the impossibility of checking
sales and printing.

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I also started receiving a lot of emails
from readers of the blog

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telling me my books were not available
in their countries.

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The industry distributes books in Spanish
only where it is profitable:

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Argentina, Spain, Mexico,

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but if a Salvadoran or a Peruvian
wants my book,

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they have no choice...
They will never get it.

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With the press I was going through
something similar.

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They asked me articles 400-words long,

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but if there was half a page
of advertising,

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the editor called me to tell me that
this week my column was 200-word long.

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When the European economic crisis came
and the companies

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stopped advertising in newspapers,

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I thought "Now I'll be able to go back
to 400 words".

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But no, they removed a sheet
from the newspaper and left me with 150.

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Last year, when these issues
started to get worse,

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I got very tired and publicly broke up
with the publishing companies

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Mondadori from Italy,
Plaza & Janes from Spain,

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Sudamericana from Argentina
and Grijalbo from Mexico.

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I also publicly finished with
the newspapers

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La Nación from Argentina
and El País from Spain.

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In 1400 words in the blog, free,
I told them to fuck off.

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(Laughs)

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(Applause)

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As I did this,
and after a year of silence,

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I started communicating
with the people from my blog

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and I told them I had a new idea.

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An idea that could be really fun
and especially risky

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but that had the secret goal of proving,

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also and specially to myself,

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that the famous crisis of the industry
is not an economic crisis

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but a moral one, it's a crisis of greed.

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The idea was of making
an impossible magazine

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from my backyard, in a town in Catalonia,

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without any offices,
and with a staff integrated

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only by my family and childhood friends.

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A magazine that would be called Orsai,
just like my blog.

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One night with Chiri,
who's my dear friend,

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we wrote a kind of decalogue

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a sort of promise to the readers.
This happened exactly one year ago.

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We promised the magazine wouldn't have
any advertising, not an inch of it.

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It wouldn't have
private or state subsidies.

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We promised it would have
the best graphic quality available

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in any of the countries where distributed.

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That it would do without
any possible intermediaries.

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That it would have a paper version,
and a dynamic version for iPad and iPhone,

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for BlackBerry and, besides,
a free PDF ten days later,

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so the magazine can be read
regardless of the cost.

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We promised those to write
and draw in the magazine

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would be only people me
and Chiri admire a lot.

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That it would be quarterly
and have more than 200 pages.

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That it would cost the equivalent of
15 Saturday newspapers in every country.

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We stated at the 8th item
that we were to put the money,

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and that we were going to make it
even if it didn't sell.

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The 9th item said that we would be happy
if we saved the investment.

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and the 10th, that if we didn't save
the investment, we didn't give a fuck...

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(Applause)

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At that moment an amazing thing happened

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within the community of the blog.

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Something we hadn't foreseen:

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the readers of Orsai spread the idea,

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they told their friends

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there were some men in their forties,
in a town hidden in the mountain

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that wanted to make a
magazine of popular

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literature, of chronic
narrative, with long texts,

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just in the middle of the paper crisis.

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Before even telling them
what the magazine was going

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to be about, the readers
started buying it massively.

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People put a faith that I hadn't seen
in a long time

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in a cultural product.

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It was bought by 10 000 people,
I repeat: without knowing its contents,

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in pre-sale, before it was released.

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And it was an expensive magazine:
16 euros in Europe, 12 dollars in America.

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They bought it from everywhere, including
Salvadorans, Costa Ricans, Peruvians,

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Latin Americans living
in Thailand, in Japan.

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Readers from every region decided
to distribute it themselves.

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We decided that magazines wouldn't be sold
per unit but in packs of ten,

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so that you could distribute
the remaining nine in your area.

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This way, we also killed
the intermediary for distribution,

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which is a mafia.

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Distribution gets
the 50% of the sale price

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of every publication we buy.

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The author gets the 8 %,
the big stores, the 50 %.

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The first day of this year,
the first number of Orsai was released.

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And we did so every three months,

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until we reached the goal
of the four annual numbers.

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The fourth number went on sale
just one week ago.

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Every magazine weighs about a kilogram

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and it makes a visual impact;
it has no advertising.

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More than a hundred invited authors
wrote through these four numbers.

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Among them Juan Villoro, Abelardo Castillo
Nick Hornby, Agustín Fernández Mallo.

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It was illustrated by 'el negro' Cris,
Horacio Altuna,

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Miguel Rep, Alberto
Montt, among many others.

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They were all paid in euros.

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In the middle of all that we discovered
that the dream was only possible

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if we talked with the readers,

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and so at mid-year,

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when we were between
numbers two and three,

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we decided, in an also rather risky way,
to turn into a publisher.

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The idea was to take a standard contract

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from my former publishing companies
and write the exact opposite.

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The idea was not to defraud the authors;

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the rights always for them.

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If you wanted to leave the next day,
"Good night, you can leave, all OK".

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And specially, the author is receiving
the 50 % of the sale's price,

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instead of the 8-10%,

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And even more, the author
has the possibility of, with a password,

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checking every sale and reader online.

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They also have the email
of that reader

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to thank them or tell them:

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"I know you're buying my books
and that you're paying to me."

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We noticed, as we moved forward,
that Orsai was not a blog anymore

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nor a magazine, or a
publishing house,

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but it turned into a project
of the readers.

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Two months ago we thought
of opening a bar in Buenos Aires,

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a meeting place for those who read
the magazine, we named it Orsai.

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One afternoon I asked
the readers of the blog

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if they wanted a bar to be opened
and I also asked them

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if anyone would like to join
the project as an investor.

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We received 204 emails in 24 hours,

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with people that wanted to put
1000 or 10 000, a nuts offered 80 000.

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There were also people who had no money,

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and they offered to paint the bar,

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or to help us with the permits

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as they worked in some ministry, etc.

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Others offered to show
their paintings

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or to play with their bands
once the bar was opened.

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This occurred in early August this year.

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The Orsai bar opened last Thursday
in the heart of San Telmo,

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471 Humberto Primo, 2x1 beer before 10 pm.

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There were so many people in the opening
we had to do it four times:

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Thursday, Friday, Saturday
and last Sunday.

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In March we will try opening
another bar in Barcelona,

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using the same system of investment
of the readers,

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and the goal for the next year
is to keep making magazines,

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this time bimonthly, and besides
making a lot more books,

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the goal will be to open a third bar
in Central America

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to form a sort of Iberoamerican
triangle of culture,

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or of the drunks who read, or something...

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Two weeks ago we almost had
two and a half tons

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of our books and magazines stopped
in Buenos Aires' customs,

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due to a misunderstanding
with the Secretariat of Commerce.

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It was a wonderful Thursday,
Orsai readers from all over the world

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made a lot of noise in Twitter
with the slogan "Free Orsai".

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And that was big, because 12 hours later
the Argentinian government heard us,

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and the Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers
answered through Twitter

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saying he would personally
solve the matter.

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The magazines were
released by the next day.

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It's the last story I will tell.
I believe that it means something.

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I'm sure it's the beginning of something.

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Cultural decisions are starting
to be more and more in our hands.

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We no longer obey to voices in sole
speakers that tell us what to do.

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It's us who communicate,

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we are 400 million people
who speak Spanish.

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Every one of us, every region,

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has a different jargon
that makes us unique,

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but that also enriches us.

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We understand each other, the Internet
arrived some time ago to unite us,

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to tell us we can do things together,
specially with culture,

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which is the fundamental base
of the complexity of the mind.

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Almost ten years ago I opened a blog
because I felt alone in a foreign country.

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I felt in offside, I needed to communicate
with my people,

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and so named it Orsai.

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I am sure now that the cultural industry

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are we, the readers and the authors.

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And nobody else...

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and that the other industry,
which is afraid of changes,

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that tries to make us believe
that the Internet is a burden.

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the one that scratches and hurts,
is dying and we'll watch it die.

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Culture has to be free in every way.

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I exhort authors and editors to,
every time you release a book,

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upload a free PDF the same day,

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because you will sell more.

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We depended on a greedy industry
for years,

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buying what they wanted us to buy.

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Now suddenly, and more and more,

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they're starting to be "orsai".

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Thank you.