Reading and lockdown, conflicting numbers
How much have the Italians read?
The truth is in consolidated trends that have probably accelerated with the lockdown. The proof of all this will not be found neither among the ISTAT numbers nor among the AIE numbers, or perhaps between the links of both, where the bifurcation between book sales and ebook sales makes the investigation perimeter wider and the photograph less clear of what happened.According to the ISTAT
in third place among the activities of leisure, is the reading which is dedicated to the 62,6% of the population. These are people who have declared that they have spent part of the day reading books, magazines, newspapers or other: there are more men (64,5%) and women (60,8%). 39.7% has read books, newspapers or other on-line or on digital media, 34.6% on paper. [...] In a day of phase 1, the reading of books has affected 26.9% of the population 18 years and older, with a higher proportion of women (30,8%) than men (22.7 percent). The majority of the population is dedicated to the reading of paper books, while the reading on the digital was in the 7%.According to the institute of statistics ( pdf ), in short, the reading was all in all a protagonist during the lockdown, both in paper version in the digital version, although the numbers relate to formats different from the traditional book. According to ISTAT, above all, “ reading is one of those activities which is able to devote more time during the lockdown, both online (46,7%) and on paper (39,8%) “. And this is absolutely in contrast with the photography IEA.
According to the survey, IEA - Cepell
The reading in the preceding 12 months (books, ebooks, audiobooks), tap the lowest value by 2017, when it has been activated, the Observatory AIE: in may 2020, the percentage of italians (15-74 years) who declared to have read at least one book is of 58%, a decrease of 15 percentage points compared to march of the previous year. And the value drops to 50% when you take into consideration only the last two months, namely march and April of 2020. Who has not read the books in march and April of 2020 is 50% of the population, while on an annual basis, this percentage is 42%.According to the IEA ( pdf ) of the time spent reading is decreasing . Indeed, even “ Almost half of those who did not read during the lockdown (47%) said that the reason was lack of time, the 35% lack of space in the house where you can focus, the 33% concerns, 32% have replaced the books with the news “.
The problem, in this as in other cases, lies in the fact that innovation generates bottlenecks that part of the supply chain may not be able to overcome. The IEA takes advantage of it to ask for aid to libraries, which in this context may be penalized by virtue of an isolation that has reduced the physical presence of the buyers and that has raised for and against the propensity to purchase online.
The data collected in may, finally, we say that it is strongly reduced the number of readers who have purchased books in the previous 12 months (they are 35% in 2020, were 63% in the previous year) and that the market is going to face a heavy decline because of the behavior of strong readers. Buyers who define themselves as strong readers, in fact, spend from 4.4 million to 3.5 million, a decline of 20%
The risk is to leave behind part of the chain of the book and have not yet consolidated alternative solutions of sufficient thickness. The interpretative key is the same as that linked to the smart working , where a change is too sudden and could explode at situations that would fall in the crisis without parachutes are available: the process must be controlled or you could have dangerous results already in the short term.
