Books, sales slow down and after boom the market sees stagnation
Sales in the first six months of the year -0.1%. Cipolletta (Aie): 'Measures are needed'
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Key points
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Between one year and the next, 900,000 copies were lost in sales. And, again with reference to the first six months of the year, the figures referring only to the trade market (non-fiction and fiction bought in bookshops, online and in large-scale distribution) do not go beyond -0.1% in value sales, reaching 675.8 million.
Market stagnation
.After the great leap of 2021, Italian publishing is now slowing down. This is the summary assumption as it transpires from the Report on the State of Publishing 2024 by the research office of the Italian Publishers' Association (Aie). "The data for the first months of 2024," comments Aie president Innocenzo Cipolletta, "show a stagnation in the publishing market, or rather a recession, a small recession if we take the data net of inflation. In fact, the number of copies sold is lower in the first months of 2024 than in 2020. This is a situation that worries us because it is also coupled with the decline of some financial resources that were previously available in this market'. In two years, says the Aie president, resources 'amounting to EUR 100 million' have been lost.
18 apps and funds for libraries
The cahiers de doléances start first of all with the changes concerning the 18 app, replaced by the mechanism of Carta Cultura Giovani and Carta del Merito. The former is for 18-year-olds resident in Italy and belonging to families with an Isee income of up to 35,000 euro. The Carta del Merito, on the other hand, will take into account school performance: it can only be awarded to students with a high school graduation grade of at least 100, applied for by the age of 19 and usable throughout the year following graduation. A mechanism that does not help, according to the protagonists of the book industry. All the more so with warnings of impoverishment for families. Another of Cipolletta's references is 'to the loss of the 30 million for libraries and that testifies to the fact that the market without these interventions risks regressing'.
Cipolletta (Aie): Organic and long-lasting industrial policies are needed
Inflation (a 16% looking at price growth from 2019) has come full circle for an industry that, through the Aie association, is issuing a clear SOS. "Publishing," adds the Aie president, "has shown solidity and the ability to renew itself in recent years, emerging strengthened from the Covid crisis. Without organic and long-term industrial policies, today we risk losing the challenge of innovation to epochal changes such as that imposed by artificial intelligence".
Considerations, these, which, Cipolletta concludes, cannot be dismissed or dismissed as non-urgent: 'Since in 2025 there will be no more resources that were still there in 2024,' the publishers' chairman concludes, 'the situation for us can be particularly worrying. This is why we have asked as the book industry for a real framework law to support books in the sense of support for reading and book infrastructure'.
