Italian publishing is confirmed as the country's leading cultural industry with a turnover (value of sales) of 3,388 million euros in 2022, up by almost 300 million compared to the values recorded in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, and settling (-1.5%) compared to the previous year.
In the first nine months of 2023, there was a slight growth in sales compared to 2022 (+0.2%) and amounted to €1,033.5 million in the trade market alone (essays and fiction sold in bookstores, online and by large retailers). Copies sold in the nine months of 2023 were 69.9 million, down one million from the previous year, but up almost nine from 2019. Italians are therefore buying more books than pre-pandemic and the industry has accompanied this growth with an increasingly wide and articulated offer: 83,950 new printed titles were published in 2022 while the catalog is close to 1.4 million titles (1,393,199). In 2022, the sale of translation rights of Italian works abroad stood at just under 8,000 contracts (7,889).
This is according to data from the 2023 Annual Report on Italian Publishing, edited by the Studies Office of the Italian Publishers Association, presented on the opening day of the Buchmesse in Frankfurt.
In 2022, Italy bought the translation rights of 9,432 titles from abroad. In 2010 there were 9,009 purchases and 4,217 sales, in 2001 there were 5,400 purchases and 1,800 sales.
In particular, in 2022 the best-selling genres to foreign publishing houses were books for children and young people (35%), popular non-fiction (20%), adult fiction (19%), non-university manuals (9%), comics (5%). Europe is the leading outlet area with 62% of purchases, Asia 18%, Latin America 6%, the Middle East (5%), Africa 4%, the USA and Canada 3%. The European countries where it exported the most in 2022 were Spain, France, Poland, Greece and Germany.
On the European scene, Italian publishing ranks fourth in terms of value of sales on the domestic market (3,338 million: 50 million in exports were excluded), behind Germany (9,444 million), the United Kingdom (5,327 million) and France (5,094 million).
The Spanish market has a value of sales of 2,719 million.
In 2022, the more than €3 billion (€3,388 million) of Italian publishing sales were higher than the €2,941 million of pay TV, the €1,725 million of free-to-air TV (TV licence fee), and the €1,721 million of video games.
Last year, 83,950 titles of printed books were published in Italy, down 1.5% compared to 2021, an exceptional year in which the release of several titles that publishers had postponed due to the pandemic had been rescheduled. The growth in new products in 2022 compared to 2010 was 37.8%. The growth of the annual proposal is accompanied by the expansion of the vivo catalogue, which now stands at 1,393,199 titles, an expansion made possible by the possibilities provided by e-commerce. The number of publishing houses active in 2022 (those that have entered at least one title in the database of books on the market) broke through the 5 thousand mark (5,184): over a thousand more than 12 years ago. On the other hand, the production of e-books decreased to 37,177 titles, but the figure is influenced by a different cataloguing of multi-format titles, i.e. e-books of different formats with different ISBN codes that are now counted in the system only once.
Despite inflation, the average producer cover price (and therefore not weighted on sales) in 2022 is 19.87 euros, in line with the values of 2021 and 2020 and lower than the 2010 figure (21.6 euros). On the other hand, the average cover price of sales (weighted on sales) is 14.84 euros, the same value as in 2021 and lower than that of 2020 (15.08 euros).
All rights reserved © Copyright ANSA