At the meeting on November 11 of Rome’s minister of culture Alessandro Giuli at the Associazione Italiana Editori’s offices in Milan are, from left, Laura Ballestra of the Italian Library Association; AIE president Innocenzo Cipolletta; Paolo Ambrosini of the Association of Italian Booksellers Confcommercio;
Antonio Terzi of the Italian Booksellers’ and Stationers’ Union Confesercenti; Medardo Montaguti of the National Federation of Stationers; Chiara Sbocchia, a member of the minister’s staff; minister Alessandro Giuli;
Emanuele Merlino and Piero Tatafiore of the minister’s staff; Fabrizio Cattaneo of the
Union of Italian Catholic Publishers and Booksellers (UELCI); and Andrea Palombi of the Association of Independent Publishers. Image: AIE
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘We Are Not Asking for Subsidies’
Considering the relatively close, cooperative working relationship that Italy’s publishers had with the immediate past Italian minister of culture, Dario Franceschini, it may come as a surprise to some that the trade organizations representing Italy’s book publishing industry have just met for the first time with Franceschini’s successor in the Meloni administration, Alessandro Giuli.
In an extraordinary move, however, the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) reports today (November 11) that it and six brother-organizations have met for a first session with Giuli to deliver a request that he “restore support” for the industry by putting back into place the legal supply-chain framework under which the book business had been operating.
Specifically and as anticipated, this involves a request that the “Culture Card” and “Merit Cards” that replaced the highly effective “18App” culture voucher be reviewed, and the publishers and their associates are calling for a restart of the nation’s fund for libraries.
“We are confident that this first meeting of the book industry with the minister of culture Alessandro Giuli can start a new positive phase: we urgently need to see the measures to support demand that were cancelled in the last two years restored.”
Their urgency in making such requests? Only a few weeks after the success of Guest of Honor Italy at Frankfurter Buchmesse—considered both culturally and business-wise a major moment for Europe’s fourth largest book market—the Italian trade is reporting that in the first 10 months of this year, it has lost 1.7 million unit book sales.
In this major discussion with Giuli, the book industry was represented by:
- AIE president Innocenzo Cipolletta
- Association of Independent Publishers president (ADEI), Andrea Palombi
- Paolo Ambrosini, president of the Association of Italian Booksellers Confcommercio (ALI)
- Antonio Terzi, president of SIL, the Italian Booksellers’ and Stationers’ Union Confesercenti
- The vice-president of the Union of Italian Catholic Publishers and Booksellers (UELCI), Fabrizio Cattaneo
- Medardo Montaguti, president of the National Federation of Stationers
- Laura Ballestra, president of the Italian Library Association (AIB)
And despite the serious concerns about unit sales in the Italian market lagging so significantly in the first 10 months of this year, the key players in the meeting with Giuli have released a joint statement indicating that they’re upbeat about the chances of a good response on at least the specific asks they believe are the most immediately critical.
“We are confident,” the seven book-business leaders say in their message to the news media, “that this first meeting of the book industry with the minister of culture Alessandro Giuli can start a new positive phase: we urgently need to see the measures to support demand that were cancelled in the last two years restored—also following up on the minister’s announcements regarding the return of the library fund.”
The Ask: Seven Presidents, One Document
The seven presidents arrived at their meeting with a document for the minister of culture, laying out the prompt for their alarm under the title For a New Book Policy: Notes From the Book and Reading Supply Chain.”
“We are not asking for subsidies, but for industrial and cultural policies that allow us all together to make the country grow.”
That shortfall of 1.7 million copies in the trade market comprises fiction and nonfiction in print, sold in both physical and digital retail outlets, the physical channels including supermarkets.
A more detailed list of the book business players’ demands:
- That review of the Cultura Giovani and del Merito cards, as mentioned, which so far, the industry says, have failed to reach a significant audience of young people as did the original 18App. As a bit of background, years of the 18App’s offer of some €500 to each Italian as he or she turned 18 was producing a strong revenue stream for publishing, the industry finding that the bulk of the average 18App’s grant was being put into books
- A reopening of the terms for registration and spending on the first edition of a restored app
- The rapid refinancing of the special fund of €30 million (US$31.9 million) for libraries, in line with programmatic lines mentioned by the minister himself in the Roman parliament
- An increase in resources for the tax credit for bookstores
- New resources to defend bibliodiversity and pluralism in editorial production
- Looking at a new supply chain law, it also calls for a tax credit for paper purchases—which ironically has been green-lighted for newspaper and periodical publishers but not for book publishers—as well as incentives for innovation, and increased funds made available to the Center for Books and Reading to increase reading rates in Italy by reducing territorial disparities, the southern peninsula, in general, having long been understood to have less traction, especially among young readers.
“With respect to these issues,” these industry players say as they conclude their report on their first meeting with Alessandro Giuli, “we have found in the minister—whom we thank for having wanted to meet us at the AIE headquarters—an attentive and sensitive interlocutor, aware of the social value of books and reading as well as the need to have a plural, strong, and autonomous publishing industry because it is economically sustainable and because infrastructures for reading, such as bookshops and libraries, must be spread throughout the territory.
“We believe that we have been listened to and understood with respect to our needs. For some issues such as support for libraries there are already commitments, and we await answers for the others.”
And in a moment of clarity about their intentions, the leaders of these seven organizations point purposefully at their intentions: “We are not asking for subsidies, but for industrial and cultural policies that allow us all together to make the country grow.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Italian market and its guest of honor program at Frankfurt is here; more on reading and the culture of literature is here; more from us on bookselling is here; and more from us on industry statistics from many countries in international publishing is here.
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