A very good 2021 for Italian publishing
In the end, the good news continued. After the good results of the first half of 2021, last year closed with a further increase for Italian publishing.
Confirming the forecasts that had been made almost a year ago came the data illustrated by the president of the Italian Publishers’ Association Ricardo Franco Levi on the final day of the XXXIX Advanced Seminar of the Umberto ed Elisabetta Mauri School for Booksellers. During the conference, market data produced by AIE in cooperation with Nielsen Bookscan were presented.
A good time for Italian publishing
The results do not lie: Italian publishing confirms itself as the sixth in the world (after the USA, China, Germany, Great Britain and France) and the fourth in Europe, with 3.1 billion euro at the cover price of the entire sector.
Italian publishing grew by 16% in 2021, reaching EUR 1.701 billion in sales at cover price. We would like to specify that ‘publishing’ in this case means ‘miscellaneous publishing’, i.e. printed fiction and non-fiction books sold in physical bookshops, online and large organised distribution.
While the cover price of books sold fell (14.72%, -2.4% compared to 2020), the number of books published rose again (85,551 new books published, + 22.9% compared to 2020).
The number of eBooks published, on the other hand, decreased to 49,313 new publications (-5.6%).
Speaking of ‘digital editions’, i.e. eBooks and audio books, it can be seen that the former see a decrease in their market value to EUR 86 million (-11%), while the latter make an important leap forward to EUR 24 million (+37%), taking into account the value of subscriptions.
Distribution channels
Speaking of distribution channels, online bookshops continued their growth trend, rising from 632.96 million in sales at cover price to 739.93 million. Physical bookshops also recovered after the losses of 2020 (from 752.2 million to 876 million), while large-scale organised distribution dropped again (from 86.8 million to 85.1 million). The preference ranking of distribution channels remains unchanged, with physical bookshops as the first choice (51.5% market share), followed by online bookshops (43.5%) and large-scale retail (5.0%).
In general, market growth affected all literary genres. However, the great leap forward of the macro-category comprising comics and manuals, which grew by an impressive 37.2%, should be noted.
Looking at the millions of copies sold by genre, specifically, compared to 2020, we can note the boom in comics (11 million copies sold, +134%), fiction by foreigners (9.2 million copies sold, +15%) and books for children aged 0 to 5 (8.5 million copies sold, +23%).
Italian genre fiction also grew (+13%), followed by biographies and autobiographies (+22%), politics and current affairs (+32%) and family and well-being (+25%).
And what does this year have in store for us? Despite the good performance, there are risks.
As President Levi points out: ‘The numbers are also very good compared to the performance of other countries in Europe, but the future is not without its unknowns. On the positive side, the confirmation of public support measures and the expectation for the new system law for books. But there is the paper emergency, for prices and availability, and the heavy impact of piracy remains. In addition, some sectors, such as art and tourism publishing, are still suffering greatly from the effects of the pandemic’.
