Italy is the sixth publisher in the world after the USA, China, Germany, England and France and the book in Italy maintains the first position as a cultural industry after Pay TV and video games.
The cover price of sales is identical to that of 2021, 14.84 euros, and is down 0.9% compared to 2019, the pre-Covid year.
The number of books published, although lower than in 2021, exceeds that of 2019: +3.8%. With 76,575 new books published in 2022. The sale of e-books is decreasing -28.6%, despite the 35,200 novelties published last year.
After the sharp decrease suffered in 2020 in favor of online sales, the physical bookstore channel is the first purchasing channel with a market share of 53.2%. Online is at 42.2% and large-scale distribution at 4.6%, both have not yet returned to pre-Covid levels. Book sales in supermarkets and hypermarkets continue to decline: in 2022 they still lost 10% of sales compared to the previous year.
In the book genre, 2022 favors comics +8.6%, foreign fiction +7%, Italian fiction +4.9%. Worth noting is the debacle of non-fiction with -8.6% and professional publishing with -12.3%. Data from the Publishers’ Association confirm that the market is certainly growing with novelties, but above all with the books in the catalogue, those that have already been published even for years.
How will this year go according to the Publishers Association
– Italian publishing holds and consolidates compared to pre-pandemic, but faces new challenges Impact of inflation and high living costs on Italian spending
– At an industrial level, the growth in costs, paper and energy, drastically reduces margins and particularly puts the most fragile operators such as independent bookstores and small publishers in crisis
– The general trend of the market is increasingly dependent on the decisions taken by the largest operator in the public sale sector
– A new law on the book is being examined by the Government and Parliament
– Impact of piracy especially on non-fiction and miscellaneous
An observation on sales channels
Perhaps it would be better to rethink the assortments in large-scale distribution by focusing more on novelties with a less massified and more valuable display and above all by placing the department in a more suitable place for sales, in our opinion it is the most mistreated category of all those present in hypermarkets and supermarkets, generally after frozen foods and batteries. The display must be re-studied and not confused with weekly and daily newspapers and above all it should be checked more often. Think of an invitation-to-read area, perhaps sales would increase.
(Luigi Rubinelli on Alimentando.info of 03/14/2023)
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