Publishing Task Force- Italbooks: The Newsletter

For additional reading: aap-august-2024-statshot

Frankfurt Book Fair 2024: Professional Attendance Up 9%

With the professional days of the Frankfurt Book Fair wrapping up, fair director Juergen Boos shared that the annual event saw a rise in professional visitors this year, with preliminary numbers showing some 114,000 trade visitors, up from 105,000 in 2023, and a 7.5% increase in exhibitors.

While the fair’s visitor numbers have grown, Boos acknowledged that the fair is still adjusting to a post-Covid reality. One aspect of that reality is a decline in the number of exhibitor booths (despite the bump in exhibitors) compared to pre-pandemic levels. “Stand-wise, we are still below 2019,” Boos said, chalking the decline up to the consolidation of publishing companies in France and Germany, as well as budget cuts by the German government, which stopped NGOs and cultural institutions, such as the Goethe Institute, from exhibiting at the fair. Nevertheless, said Boos, the cuts are not likely to curtail Frankfurt’s participation at other fairs abroad.

Boos noted that, in recent years, the fair has been trying to balance its role serving the trade while also accommodating growing interest from the public. As a result, Saturday attendance will be restricted to 60,000 people, in what Boos called “an experiment” in crowd management.

For additional information: publishersweekly.com/Frankfurt-Book-Fair   

American Library Association (ALA) Conference & Exhibition

The 2024 edition of the ALA Conference and Exhibition was held in San Diego from June 27 to July 2nd. The Italian Trade Agency exhibited at this important event for the first time, promoting Italian publishers and two important organizations: AIE (Associazione degli Editori Italiani) and BCBF (Bologna Children’s Book Fair).

The ALA – American Library Association, founded in 1876, is the largest library and oldest library association in the world with a current membership of 52,000. The conference & exhibition had over 13,500 attendees in San Diego, representing the entire United States library market. The US public library market represents an annual purchasing budget of over $1.49 billion.

  News from Italy:

PLPL: Più Libri Più Liberi

The annual book fair held in Rome, Italy, Piu’ Libri Piu’ Liberi is scheduled for December 4 – 8, 2024. This fair is the first fair dedicated to small and medium sized publishers and is being held at the new congress center in Rome, La Nuvola.

The Publishing Task Force of the Italian Trade Agency-Chicago assists in the selection of delegates of publishing professionals to attend the fair and work at the Rights Centre through the fair organizer’s Invitation Program.

Frankfurt Book Fair 2024: Italy Guest of Honor: full halls, rights sales and record attention from foreign publishers

Italy Guest of Honor 2024 at Frankfurter Buchmesse closes today in Frankfurt, with more than 230 of our country’s publishers and literary agents in attendance. “We have come this far through a path that was not easy, also going through strong moments of contrast and misunderstandings,” explained Innocenzo Cipolletta, president of the Italian Publishers Association (AIE). “But we have always believed that we had to make a commitment to support the freedom of expression of authors and to bring to Buchmesse the whole richness, the complexity of our publishing and literature, and we have done so by confronting everyone. We record an important increase in attendance and volume of business among publishers in and outside the Collective Exhibition. It was the right path, and we see the results today and we think we will see them even more in the coming months and years in terms of sales of translation rights. Fundamental in this regard will be the support of institutions, including through the system of calls for translations, which needs to be strengthened and rationalized.”

Rights sales and record attention to Italian publishing. At the end of the five days of the Fair, the last two and a half of which were also open to the non-professional public, there were full halls for the meetings of the literary program curated by AIE with the coordination of the Extraordinary Commissioner of the Government, as well as for those of the professional program, also curated by AIE with the support of the Italian Trade Agency and Italy Guest of Honor 2024. Satisfaction among publishers and literary agents present independently or within the Italian Collective Exhibition organized by the Italian Trade Agency with AIE.

Gianluca Foglia, General Manager Content Pole of Feltrinelli, speaks of “an important opportunity to give light and visibility to the most literary Italian fiction by enhancing the many different voices that animate it. Proof of this is the great attention for L’anniversario, the new novel by Andrea Bajani that we will publish in January and that has already been sold worldwide, and the interest of many European publishers for Alma, the novel by Federica Manzon that has just won the Campiello prize.”

For additional information: aie.it/English

Upcoming Events: