Today there are about three thousand publishers, but their number varies a great deal from year to year. However, those active are about half, out of the 1.500, who share the 3,4 billion euros in turnover.
From Fort Alamo
In 2013, winter seemed to have arrived for the centuries-old book industry. Like the other sectors of the cultural industry it was reduced to a sort of Fort Alamo (Disney+). The Internet offer looked like Santana's army marching, overwhelming, unstoppable.
While the other sectors of the media and entertainment gave ground and power to the Internet to become a diarchy, the book industry unleashed a counter-offensive, this one so effective, massive, of the people and with the people who write at the forefront, which, it not only repulsed the siege, but confined that supply to a tightly fenced reservation.
… to growth
Today the book industry in its traditional, i.e. pre-digital, forms is back to growth in a truly impressive way with bookstores once again opening their doors and thriving in business.
Amazon is slowly withdrawing to focus on cooler sectors such as logistics, cloud and artificial intelligence. In Seattle there is no longer Jeff Bezos but Andy Jassy, a big boy who built the entire cloud infrastructure of the e-commerce giant and it is there that he rightly sees the Eldorado.
Jeff Bezos, who has dedicated himself to travel to Mars, is no longer married to the writer and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott who, back in 1994, had come up with the idea of book ecommerce, becoming one of its souls and keeping Bezos on track who he threw into everything he saw as a business, including diapers.
On the horizon
Long live the book, then! We like this because the book is deeply rooted in our imagination to such an extent that if paperbacks are excluded, it is a technology that has changed very little since Gutenberg imprinted the first page of the Bible in Mainz with his letterpress machine. movable type.
However, as John Ford says to the young Spielberg at the end of The Fablemans (Prime Video), "watch out for the horizon!".
And artificial intelligence is on the horizon, or rather that branch of artificial intelligence that has an impact on the production and circulation of content that is the substance of books.
One wonders, however, if the book industry will resist the new immense winter that is coming. That of artificial intelligence, in fact, which will upset not only the media industry, but the whole of society. AI is truly a new global organizing principle, far beyond a mere tool.
Collision or merge?
Waiting for this collision, as it happens in the beautiful film by Lars Von Trier Melancholia (Prime Video), we already feel a certain dizziness, a sort of vertigo. But more than a collision, it could be a union.
And it will be a union. Because I ask myself: with what should we educate artificial intelligence if not stuffing it with knowledge that is in books and purging it of the hallucinations it takes from the junk that is ever more abundant in the channels of cyberspace.
It would be a union that could help put an end to a problem that the book industry, especially in Italy, has had since the beginning of its history: the lack of people who include reading a book in their media diet. The question is not the form that the content takes, but its fruition.
It is on this consideration that heralds the Sun of the future (at the cinema) I leave you to our Michele Giocondi, historian of publishing, as well as author of two important books for those who are passionate about these topics: Italian bestsellers 1861-1946 e Brief history of Italian publishing (1861-2018) with 110 monographs of the publishing houses of yesterday and today. From the Treves brothers to Jeff Bezos.
Happy reading
The birth of the new state
At the time of the birth of the new state, the Kingdom of Italy, the country's illiteracy rate was 78%. In practice, only one in five citizens knew how to read and write, with all the necessary reservations, then, as highlighted in the previous post.
It is therefore all too evident, and we would say almost trivial, to point out that the country's publishing industry would have been heavily affected by this figure.
If we then consider the level of great poverty in which the popular classes fell, it is obvious to assume that this certainly did not lead to "cultural" type consumption, but barely, and when it succeeded, to satisfy the primary needs of survival.
The long struggle to eradicate illiteracy
Then, decade after decade, the illiteracy rate would decrease, but always too slowly, until it practically disappeared during the XNUMXs. In essence, it took over a century to eradicate it.
Therefore, the cultural industry of the country could count on a very small base, which was largely identified with the publishing industry.
The birth of other forms of illiteracy
However, in the same period in which the victory over "traditional" (or historical) illiteracy could be celebrated, other forms of illiteracy began to arise, such as functional, returning and digital illiteracy, against which we are still fighting.
It almost seems like proof of the fact that the fight against all types of illiteracy never ends, that the victory over it is never a definitive acquisition, but requires a continuous effort in every age.
Otherwise more or less extensive pockets of "illiteracy" will always remain: in short, this struggle must always keep us busy.
The publishing industry
The publishing industry therefore found itself operating in a very difficult context and had to act with the utmost prudence. The first impression one gets from observing the data we have is that national publishing was characterized from the outset by a relative abundance of published titles, however with a limited amount of absorption, i.e. buyers and books sold . Put simply, many authors, many published titles, but few readers. This is the basic fact that characterized our publishing industry then, and continues to do so today!
Some data
And let's start with the numbers here too.
In the decade 1861-1870 media were printed 3183 works per year (151 of scholastic and 3032 of miscellaneous).
In the next one, 1871-1880, the number rose by more than 50%, reaching 5046 qualifications (120 of scholastic and 4926 of miscellaneous).
In the decade 1881-1890 it rose again by another 50% until it reached 7598 qualifications per year on average (351 scholastic and 7247 miscellaneous).
In 1891-1900 the number rose again by 20%: 9019 qualifications (627 of scholastic and 8392 of miscellaneous).
Considerable growth in the late nineteenth century
Basically, in the first forty years of the Kingdom there was a continuous and prolonged growth of printed titles, which went from 3183 in 1861 to over 9.000 of 1900: a growth of almost 300%.
Publishing production runs much faster than the literacy rate grows, which in the same period passes from 22% to 52% of the population, which represents approximately 160% growth.
It almost seems that the country had to fill a gap with the rest of Europe in terms of publishing, and in this period it has largely filled it. 9.000 titles a year with a literate population of 52% in 1900, that's fine. The country's lag is not there, i.e. in the number of titles published, but in the scarcity of sales.
Situation in the first half of the twentieth century
Once the gap has been bridged, that is, once the great race has ended, the publishing world seems to have to recover from the effort employed and the production of titles drops considerably in the following decade, 1901-1910, until it drops to 6.661 average titles per year.
We then see it fluctuate for a good fifty years between 6.000 and 10.000 titles a year. In fact, we will have to wait until the XNUMXs and XNUMXs to see substantial new growth.
Publishing production in the second half of the twentieth century
Let's go back to the data. In the decade 1911-1920 we are at 9.441 titles per year. In the following one 1921-1930 we go back to 6.964. It dates back to the decade 1931-1940 BC 10.947, to go down again in 1941-1950 a 7.165. In the decade 1951-1960 we go back slightly to 7.315. Finally, in the decade 1961-1970 we massively go back to 11.014 average titles per year. But the growth had already occurred since 1967, when total production had risen in just one year to 15.119 securities, from 9.182 in the previous year.
This was largely due to a different method of counting, which from now on also includes works up to 48 pages and reprints, previously excluded from the calculations.
Continuous growth
From this moment on, the production of titles increases considerably year after year. In 1980 they come out about 20.000 new titles a year. It is almost double what was printed ten years earlier. But that's just the beginning: in 1990 we are about 30.000 titles. And the race seems to know no bounds.
In fact, in 2000 we had a total production of 55.546 titles, printed by 2.927 publishers.
In 2010 book production rises again to 63.800 titles, however produced by a smaller number of publishing houses: around 2.700. The overall circulation is 213 million copies, while the average circulation per work is 3.340 copies per title.
In 2021 they were published (according to ISTAT) beyond 90.195 titles, for a total of over 200 million copies, printed on average in about 2.200 copies per title, a marked decrease in terms of circulation, compared to the 2010 figure.
Of these 90.195 titles, 53.861 are first editions, 30.929 are reprints, 5.405 are later editions.
For more than half, around 53%, the market is made up of miscellaneous, which has a turnover of 1,670 million euros, for a total of 112 million copies; 28% is given by scholastic, 19% by publishing for children and teenagers.
A large amount of publications
It is an enormous mass of publications, disproportionate for a poorly read country like ours. A good part of this uncontrolled tide of titles ends up in pulp, some speak of a good third, and perhaps even more. A mass of titles that doesn't even pass through bookshops, but goes directly from the typography to the pulping plant.
Of these 1500 active publishers, more than half, 53%, are micro-publishers, who publish very few books a year, for a total of not even 5.000 copies printed globally. About 37% are small publishers with an annual production of less than 100.000 copies. Medium-sized publishers, who achieve an annual production of less than a million copies are 6,7%. Large publishers make up 2,5% of publishing houses.
The big problem
The basic problem of our publishing industry, which is in any case among the first in Europe, fourth after Germany, England and France, and holds a significant share in the world, however, is the chronic scarcity of readers.
Only 40% of citizens over the age of six buy at least one book a year, about 23 million readers. Among these, the female population reveals a greater inclination to read: 48% of women against 35% of men have read at least one book during the year.
Strong readers, ie those who read at least 12 books a year, are about 13,8% of readers. 45,6% of readers read a maximum of 3 a year.
With these numbers of readers, the publishing market is still destined to survive with great difficulty. This does not mean that there are large publishing groups that compete on an equal footing with the major European competitors. Just as there are average publishers who are fighting courageously and with good results, guided by that Italian genius, otherwise also called creativity, which when it comes down to it is second to none, neither in publishing nor in other sectors, from fashion to furniture, from tourism to food, from mechanics to construction, and so on…
