TiBE 台北國際書展 2025.2.4-9

Subject｜Discovering the Italian Book Market: Data, Public Support and Internationalization

Date｜Wednesday February 5, 2025

Time｜1000-1200

Venue｜Conference Room 3, 2F, Taipei World Trade Center Hall 1

Language｜English with AI Translation(Chinese)

Organizers｜TIBE, AIE, ITA

Moderator｜Emily Chuang, Founder of Emily Agency

Speakers｜

Bruno Giancarli / Italian Publishers Association - Research Department

Paola Seghi / Italian Publishers Association - International Relations Manager

Lorenzo Armando / Italian Publishers Association - Vice President/Lexis

Rundown

Bruno Giancarli

Born in 1992, he holds a PhD in Philosophy and a First Level Master in Publishing. Since 2021, he works for the Research department of the Italian Publishers Association (AIE). He writes articles for Il Giornale della Libreria, the magazine of AIE, and he has been member of Data & Statistics Committee of the International Publishers Association. He is a lecturer in publishing masters in Italy, with courses on the Italian and foreign publishing market.

Paola Seghi

With a degree in languages, she has been working in publishing since 1999. She works at Ediser, the service company of the Italian Publishers Association, where she coordinates various activities, particularly those aimed at the internationalization of the publishing sector. She coordinates the publishing part in the Italy Guest of Honor projects. In the Italian sphere, she is responsible for the professional part of the national small and medium publishing fair in Rome (Rome Book Fair) and for the Italian ISBN Agency. Since 2019, she is a member of the organizing committee of the master's degree in publishing promoted by University of Milan, Italian Publishers Association and Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori.

Lorenzo Armando

A graduate in classical literature, he has worked in publishing since the 1980s. With the company Lexis that he founded in 1998 (now Lexis Compagnia Editoriale in Turin) and of which he is currently sole director, he provides services to Italian and foreign publishers, operates as a publisher through several imprints (Rosenberg & Sellier, Celid, Accademia University Press, Kermes) mainly in the academic and nonfiction fields, and participates in the Operas (Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities) consortium and the Italian Cultural Content Industry (ICCI) association. He is also a director of IT Publishing srl and president of TPF Association (The Publishing Fair). Since 2017, he has been a member of the Council of the Small Publishers Group, of which he was elected vice president in 2021 and president in 2023.

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The Italian Book Market: an Overview – Bruno Giancarli (Italian Publishers Association - Research Department)

An introductory meeting on the occasion of Italy Guest of Honor at the Taipei International Book Exhibition to illustrate the Italian publishing industry with the latest available data as to book production, genres and their trends as well as on sales and on reading habits in different age groups. Data will be illustrated in comparison to those of the year 2019 to see how the pandemics has changed the Italian book sector. Finally, we’ll present a focus on readers' expectations of artificial intelligence application in the book sector.

The Internationalization of Italian Publishing – Paola Seghi (Italian Publishers Association – International Relations Manager)

Unlike the world's largest publishers, Italy has no linguistic reference market outside its borders. Its internationalization therefore passes through the buying and selling of translation rights. The subject of the meeting is the trend in the purchase and sale of rights between 2001 and 2023, the main export markets, and the genres for which the most rights are sold. With a focus on the buying and selling of rights in Asian countries. The meeting will also discuss the role of translation subsidies, measures designed to help publishers export Italian books abroad.

Public Support for Reading and/or Industry? – Lorenzo Armando (Italian Publishers Association - Vice President/Lexis)

Italy is a country historically characterized by low reading rates. This is also why public support in this sector has essentially been directed towards broadening the reader base, with measures such as the fund for the purchase of books by public libraries and vouchers for eighteen-year-olds to spend on cultural consumption (especially the 18app until 2023, a measure taken up in several European countries), pending a system law that has long been requested. But in the face of the growing complexity of the supply chain, and the urgency to innovate, to ensure solidity and liveliness to the sector, we are beginning to think about measures that also concern enterprises, especially the medium and small ones that characterize the Italian system also in the sector of the cultural and creative industry.