here are the new readers, Generation Z- Corriere.it

Publishers taking the traditional stock of the state of the industry; the long queues in the rain at the ticket offices (many students) and in front of the most requested meeting rooms, rooms even more crowded by the bad weather which makes the large outdoor area unusable; the informal passing of the baton between Nicola Lagioia, director for seven years, and Annalena Benini, director since 2024, while among the stands we wonder about how the Salone will change and how much the new course of government will affect choices. It does, for example, Zero limestone according to which “hard times may come for intellectuals because the right wants to regain seats by placing the people it has had on the bench for eighty years”.

No one provides the numbers but it seems that by now the records are not of much interest. Lagioia is moved at the end of the meeting with Benini, in which they talked about their books, literature and masters, while many expect a farewell on one side, an anticipation on the other. Lagioia jokes with her mother sitting in the front row (“It didn’t seem real to her that I had found a permanent job, if you want to give me a hand, explain it to her”) and she promises that Annalena Benini will be an excellent director of the Book Fair: “Give her a hand, because Turin is not such an easy place . The Salone will certainly continue to grow, I’m sure of that». «It is an immense, truly great thing, of which I am very happy – she says – and I think that something beautiful can be done, just as the Salone has been wonderful in recent years, with the love for books and for the readers who has generated. I can’t wait to get started. In these days with Nicola, before the opening, I observed the Salone growing, being built. I’ve never seen this before. I have always come to the Salone, loving it, I had never observed the passion with which all people do it». He doesn’t talk about the ideas he has in mind, nor about the consultants who will accompany him, he says that the most important advice received from the outgoing director «is that the Turin Motor Show is the Readers’ Fair».

But who are the readers? For the market it is essential to make an identikit and the publishers, small and large, present Friday at the conference of the Italian Publishers Association (IEA) have tried to draw it by commenting on the data for the first four months of 2023. “Reassuring” he defined Enrico Selva Coddé of Mondadori Libri Trade the market that stabilizes growth compared to pre-pandemic levels with an increase of 17% over the first four months of 2019 (we are talking about sales of fiction and non-fiction, excluding school books), while physical bookstores show signs of recovery and consolidate their position as the first sales channel.

One thing is clear: today’s young readers are the ones most capable of shifting trends. Last year it was comics and manga, today it is the so-called romancethe romance novels that have conquered the charts in the last two years and which in the first four months of 2024 saw spending by readers more than double compared to 2019 (up 101.3%). These are books that often bring together young adult and fantasy, in a context of fragmentation that forces the publisher to rethink himself, says Selva: «I think we should start thinking in terms of publishing phenomena rather than genres. In the sense that the new generations think less and less in traditional categories and genres, they are decidedly more unpredictable in the logic of purchase, they are looking for emotional books, which have traits of authenticity. More than niches, they are literary forms that hybridize, just like romance. This means that the publisher’s work is more tailored, more built on the title, the offer is more crushed on the reader».

The new generation of readers, more often female readers, advancing — he says Stephen Mauri (Gems Group) — «it’s the last one, the Z, because the one a little earlier already had different tastes, she didn’t read on paper. What future does this generation have? Horrible, because we burned it and in this passion for the romance there is definitely an escapist dimension. But it would be limiting to stop there: there is also the rediscovery of feelings, of a private dimension induced by the pandemic, which produces an emotional narrative. The book is like this, born from the discontinuity of society. Of course, we don’t know how long it will last: marketing experts say that once the tastes of generations changed every seven years, now every three».

An analysis also confirmed by Alessandra Carrara (Feltrinelli Group) on the basis of data from the brand’s bookshops: «Compared to last year, manga and comics have decreased but young people, in the under 24 age group, buy. The kids are returning to the bookstore and buying fantasy and romancebut it is also true that, thanks to the TikTok phenomenon, they reach the charts titles like
Folly

by Patrick McGrath e One day this pain will come in handy for you
by Peter Cameron. They are our bet, both as publishers and as bookstores: we need to stay alert on the phenomena that interest them. And this is perhaps the most interesting novelty: social networks bring new readers who read on paper».

On the other positive data that emerges from the survey, that is the recovery of physical libraries, there is a big difference between the big groups who own their own retail and the small publishers, who are often kept off the shelf. For Marzia Corraini (Corraini Edizioni) the problem is also «the firepower of the new products» (about 70,000 a year) which holds back the entry of many small brands. While Diego Guida, who is also the president of the Group of Small Publishers in the IEA, explains: “For the algorithm of the large chains, the small publisher is a risk, so let’s start from 0.01 and we will stay at 0.01”. “Easier,” he says Maria Teresa Panini (Franco Cosimo Panini Editore) — the relationship with independent bookstores. There is a direct relationship with the bookseller. But sometimes surprises and discoveries arrive even from us little ones that allow us to enter the big chains». Even if the real enemy for the whole supply chain, whether they are small or large, second Martino Montanarini (Giunti Group), is the low propensity of Italians to read: «We opened our first bookshop thirty years ago and our development policy is to open outlets not in big cities but in shopping centres, in the suburbs. We try to structure the offer for that type of context and audience, diversifying with respect to independents or chains. We limit the number of titles present due to a sustainability issue, because our bookshops are very small. I don’t see this great contrast between big and small. The common effort is to grow readers and therefore grow the market. Only in this way can the cake expand for everyone».