The circulation of books in 2020: open questions and interpretative hypotheses

Abstract

The paper examines the available data on the book market and on reading behaviors in Italy during 2020, also taking into account the international landscape and relevant figures on other cultural consumptions, with the aim of proposing some interpretative hypotheses and analyzing the main trends.
As often happened in the past, once again the real data have disproved some forecasts. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been different in different stages of the emergency. In the first weeks of lockdown, despite the increase of free time at home, the propensity to read does not seem to have grown significantly, while the sales figures, due to the bookstores’ closures, led to fears of a collapse in consumption.
Things went differently during the second wave, with a strong recovery of the book market: the year even closed with an increase in sales value compared to 2019. However, the radical transformations that are taking place in the relative weight of different sales channels are worrying, with a significant shift from ‘physical’ bookstores towards e-commerce, where Amazon holds a share of over 80%.
Among the policies implemented in recent years to support demand and to promote reading, the ‘18-yearold bonus’ proved to be highly effective: between 2016 and 2019 it allowed a large share of the young people who had moved away from reading in the previous years, to return among the ranks of readers.