The 2022 has just come to an end and the Italian publishing industry recently released last year’s sales figures. What particularly emerges is that the year closed just below the 1.7 million euros (an economic fork between 1.676 and 1.687 billion euros) of sales at cover price, in slight decrease compared to 2021 (between -1.1% and -1.8%). The estimate, part of the data from Nielsen BookScanwas shared byItalian Publishers Association during the first day of More free books. Among the most important data, it also stands out that in the first eleven months of 2022, the market value (i.e. sales at cover price) was 1.268 billion euros, down 2.3% from 2021 but up 12.9% from pre-pandemic 2019. Also the copies sold were 86.8 millionup 14.5% compared to 2019, but down 2% compared to 2021.
The 2022 of Italian publishing explained by the experts
The president of AIE Ricardo Franco Levihas explained:
A year of consolidation after the great results of 2021 which in itself testifies to the vitality of the publishing industry and the Italians’ desire to read. But it must also be said that the publishers have kept the cost increase at home without passing it on to the price of the books. We are asking the institutions to restore the tax credit on paper, which has instead been maintained for newspapers.
In fact, despite the general increase in prices in Italy in 2022, the average price of sales is around 14.62 eurosdown 0.4% compared to 2021. However, there were 62,745 printed novelties published during the year, down 2% compared to the previous year.
Diego Guidapresident of the small publishers group of AIE, for his part placed the emphasis on territorial disparities and in particular on the difficulties of the distribution network in the South, emphasizing how the non-fiction crisis has weighed more on small publishers than on large groups, more present in fiction. In fact, apparently, in the first eleven months of the year, novels by foreign authors grew by 9.1%, those of Italians by 4.3%, comics by 15.9%. Professional non-fiction, on the other hand, dropped by 13.3%, general non-fiction by 10.8% and children and young people by 2.5%. Guida also wanted to share the difficulties of small publishers in accessing the distribution network and in particular the bookstores:
From an informal survey among us small publishers associated with AIE, we understand that 30% of our turnover comes through the distributor, all the rest is our initiatives.
About that Alexander Montiof Librerie Feltrinelli, wanted to underline:
Our bookstores are the flag of their variety on offer: in the last year we sold 352,000 different titles from 4814 publishers. These are important numbers, they account for the extraordinary effort to give life and visibility to the enormous Italian publishing production, that we realize how great it is here at Più libri più libera. Imagine what a bookcase should be like to display everything there, not counting the production of large groups. This is why publishers complain about not getting into the bookstore, it’s impossible. Growth has been eaten online, but we are resisting, here we are.
Indeed, in the first eleven months of the year, sales in physical bookstores grew by 1.3% to 674.8 million. On the other hand, online declined by 5.3% to 532.9 million, large-scale distribution by 12.7% to 60.7 million. However, the comparison with 2019 continues to be very favorable for online: in three years its market share has increased from 30.1% to 42%, while bookstores have increased from 64% to 53%.
Among the other data, the survey by theAIE Studies Office which ranks i Italian publishing brands by sales class, whether or not they belong to large groups. The survey revealed that in Italy there are 7,459 brands that have sold at least one copy of one of their titles in the last year, while the brands that have published a novelty in the last year are 5,449. Over 20 million sold at cover price are found nine brands which have 36% of the market. In the range between 20 and 5 million in turnover there are 41 brands which represent 32% of sales. Another 92 brands are in the range of 5 to one million sales, for a market share of 16%. Lastly, over 7,300 brands are below the one million mark in sales. Of these, only two hundred are those with sales above €300,000.
The publishers Gerard Mastrullo (The Happy Life) e Gregory Pilgrim (Effatà), members of the board of small publishers of AIE, also wanted to put their considerations on the matter. Mastrullo pointed out:
Digital printing on the one hand and e-commerce on the other have favored the birth and, in recent years, the growth of small publishers because the web is democratic. But the theme, rather, is not to become too Amazon-dependent in the face of book chains increasingly focused on the proposals of large groups. In this, the recovery of independent bookstores helps us a bit.
Pellegrino, on the other hand, explained:
In this sense, small publishers must learn to work more together, to share investments in fields that would otherwise not be possible. Furthermore, it is clear that there is a generational theme: today there are small publishers born in the 1990s on the market whose founders are now reaching retirement age. The passing of the baton to the children is not obvious for everyone. Facilitating generational transitions, the creation of consortia, could be strategic in these cases. With the aim of overcoming the obstacle of 6 million cover value sales in the trade market, which is the level beyond which important economies of scale can be implemented.
