In Piedmont, more than one in two residents reads less than one book a year. And publishing companies are still declining. The analysis just published by the Turin Chamber of Commerce does not bode well for the Turin Book Fair.
As many as 57.7 Piedmontese out of every 100 read less than one book a year: fAmong Piedmontese readers, the exclusive use of paper books is still prevalent (71.3%), while 10.6% only use e-readers or only read books online.
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BUSINESSES IN DIFFICULTY
For companies the situation is different. At the end of 2023 there are 3,175 company headquarters in Piedmont (-3.2% compared to 2022)representing 6.7% of the Italian total936 local units and more 16 thousand employees. 62% of the companies in the regional supply chain are located in the metropolitan city of Turin. By percentage weight, the companies of press and the reproduction of recorded media represent the first sector, with approximately 38% of company headquarters; follows thepublishing with 22.7% of company headquarters. Paper production, after printing, is the second largest sector in terms of workforce employed.
Dimensionally, over 9 out of ten businesses are micro (with fewer than 10 employees), with the exception – in manufacturing companies – of paper production companies, where micro-businesses stop at 66.4%.
Within the supply chain, the incidence of youth and foreign businesses is decidedly lower than the regional entrepreneurial system: these components represent 4.9% and 4.4% of the total respectively, compared to 9.4% and 14.4% of the overall figure. Different for the female componentwhich here has a weight of 23.7% compared to the general 22.2%.
TRANSVERSAL ACTIVITIES GROW
There are also activities that cannot be included exclusively within this chain, but which can integrate and expand the concept of publishing itself, also promoting the digitalisation process. These are, for example, companies that operate in the production of softwarein the design of portals webnews agencies and other services informationas well as activities graphics. This hybrid and numerous set will count further at the end of 2023 3,642 companieswith growth in the last year of +1.1%.
PUBLISHERS AND BOOK PRODUCTION
The Istat source data allow us to integrate the data relating to the number of companies with other quantitative information regarding the supply chain. The first concerns the book productionor the book works published in Piedmont in 2022 (latest year available), equal to 8,778with a circulation of 18,942 copies; the total number of book works published in Italy is 86,174, with a circulation of 198,012 copies. Therefore, 10.2% of Italian book production comes from Piedmont. In particular, if we look at the genre produced, Piedmont represents 19.2% of the production of scholastic works, 2.6% of works for children, 10.2% of various works for adults.
The second is related to the number of active publishers, which in Italy in 2022 (last year available) were 1,736. Piedmont represents 8.5% of Italian publishers (147), and is the third region after Lombardy and Lazio.
If we also consider the presence of libraries, they are found in Piedmont 827 librariesapproximately 10% of national libraries (8,131), with an average number of users of 657.
