2017 marks the year of recovery for the book market. And it closes with an important result for the sector as a whole (paper books, ebooks and audiobooks and Amazon's estimate): + 5,8 % on the previous year, equal to 1,485 billion euros in the trade channels (bookstores, online bookstores and large-scale retail trade). This is the main figure of the analysis by the Research Office of the Italian Publishers Association (AIE) on the 2017 book market, which will be presented by the president of AIE Ricardo Franco Levi tomorrow, 26 January, on the final day of the XXXV Seminar on the Improvement of School for Booksellers Umberto and Elisabetta Mauri scheduled in Venice.
The result, for the first time after 7 years, is also positive in terms of copies sold, equal to 88,6 million (net of those sold by Amazon), +1,2% on the previous year. It also grows e-book and audiobook market, which achieved a 64 million share euros in 2017 (+3,2% on 2016).
Where do you buy the books? First of all in bookstores, but e-commerce is making significant progress, while the supermarket is in difficulty – Physical, independent or chain bookstores remain the main channel for the purchase of new miscellaneous books, so much so that they intercept almost three quarters of purchases (69,6% to be precise). Purchases in independent bookshops (which account for 25,2%) and chain bookstores (44,4%) are decreasing to the advantage of e-commerce, which in 2017 made a real leap forward (today it accounts for 21,3. 16,5% of books sold, was 2016% in 9,1). The difficulties continue for organized large-scale distribution, which today accounts for 10,7% of the total (only last year it was XNUMX%).
The production: increasingly rich and articulated. In 2017, publishers published 66.757 titles: Fiction (Italian and foreign) today has 19.860 titles, in 1980 it stopped at 1.087 titles. Children's books, now estimated at 9.923 (they were 6.457 last year), are a number that has more than tenfold compared to 17 years ago.
The reading: scarce but much higher than what has been said so far – Istat, in its five-year survey, including in its surveys the reading of genre fiction, guides and manuals (for the home, collateral, etc.), highlighted how readers were 59,4% of the Italian population. Much more than the 40,5% that Istat itself estimated in its latest annual analysis, which excludes a significant share of books from the perimeter considered. This figure of 59,4% is confirmed by the AIE Observatory on reading behavior (on 15-75 year olds) which today records how readers in the last 12 months (even only in part) of novels, essays, detective stories, fantasy, manuals and guides have reached 62%. Reading behaviors are in fact becoming more and more complex today: 62% of Italians read paper books, but 27% also read ebooks and 11% read audio books. Considering all these methods, 65% of the Italian population over 15 reads.
The most drastic comment – “The data – comments the president of AIE Ricardo Franco Levi – clearly tell us that the largest cultural industry in the country is starting to walk again. The book is returning to grow with the country, indeed it is a condition of growth of the country. For this reason we hope that books and reading will be central to the programs of these elections and of the new government”.
