The 43^rd annual Advanced Training Seminar at La Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri highlighted key topics facing the Italian market and how booksellers and publishers will adapt to new challenges.

By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox

Last week, La Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri welcomed 30 booksellers to Venice for the 43^rd annual Advanced Training Seminar, held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. In a year when book sales in Italy are reported to be down again, it seemed an odd coincidence that the wedding of Amazon’s founder took place in the same location just a few months before the seminar.

As previously written, the Advanced Training Seminar brings together booksellers from around the country for workshops on customer care, stock dimension, layout, financial planning, and the economics of bookstores, among other key topics that can help booksellers improve their business.

In addition, the program helps booksellers understand the Italian market as a whole, as well as providing an international perspective with panels on bookselling from leaders in other markets as well as a discussion of one of the greatest current challenges to the industry by international publishers and booksellers – this year, the discussion was on artificial intelligence.

The Italian Book Market – Reporting on 2025 and Forecast for 2026

On Friday, Innocenzo Cipolletta, President of the Italian Publishers Association (AIE), presented key market analysis, based on NielsenIQ BookData figures. The full presentation can be found here.

In 2025, the trade print market was down 3% compared to 2024, which saw a decline of 1.5% from 2023. The continued decline in sales is showing a troubling trend that was not improved by the previous changes to the 18app (the culture voucher for young people). But, there is room to be hopeful for the future with growth in some areas of the market.

Ebook sales grew by 2.4% and audiobooks rose by 13.3%. When digital formats are included, the trade book market totals €1,604.9 million, down 1.6% year-on-year.

“We are closing a difficult year, falling below 100 million copies for the first time in the past five years. We are confident that 2026 may mark an initial change in direction, thanks to government measures supporting demand and to household spending trends,” said Cipolletta.

“Our hope is that 2026 may trigger a change in direction, also thanks to measures supporting demand: the €60 million library fund, the €17 million Culture Card for low-income families, and, looking ahead to 2027, the Cultural Voucher for all high school graduates under the age of 19, that will replace the vouchers currently in force.”

The hardest hit of this decline are the independent publishers and independent bookstores which saw significant decrease in sales in 2025.

Bookselling Around the World

The challenges in Italy are not unusual to the market in general, specifically in Europe. As Cipolletta noted, the 3% decline in copies sold in Italy is consistent with what is being seen in other European countries – Germany (4.9%), the Netherlands (3%), France and the United Kingdom (each 2.5%), Spain matched the previous year’s results (+0.2%), while Portugal stands out as an exception, with a growth of 7%.

The program’s panel “International Bookshops: Distinctive Elements in their Relationship with their Customers,” featuring Javier Arrevola, CEO, Casa del Libro (Spain); Michael Busch, CEO, Thalia (Austria, Germany, Switzerland);  Alessandra Carra, CEO, Gruppo Feltrinelli (Italy); and James Daunt Managing Director, Waterstones (UK) and CEO, Barnes & Noble (US), focused on some of the issues at the heart of this decline and what bookstores can be doing.

At the heart of the conversation was a key one to both bookselling and publishing – understanding your customer and providing high-level products and services as well as meeting them where they are.

BookTok is driving a new generation of readers into stores for physical copies, which is changing the types of books stores should stock as well as layout that appeals to what readers want. Carra noted that was something Feltrinelli was focusing on with great success.

In Spain, there is a backlash against Amazon with customers wanting to support bookshops, so Arrevola wants to make the Casa de Libro bookshops a destination where people don’t just come and shop, but come and stay as he highlighted in this piece in Monocle.

Busch noted that they even created a studio where influencers might come to record in the store which could further engage fans. Busch also noted that the price of books is one that some customers complain about, so Thalia has entered into the used book business to provide that option to customers.

At the heart of the conversation is one that Daunt feels a strong personal connection to – one of the ways booksellers can succeed no matter the external challenge is to just be a good a bookseller. Provide a nice, inviting bookstore and get to know your customers so you can stock books and provide recommendations that will lead to continued business.

One point that was extremely important to the conversation is the market insight bookstores receive daily from their customers and how to feed that back to publishers so both sides benefit.

Artificial intelligence and Publishing Intelligence

The final roundtable discussion of the seminar was one previewed last week – “Artificial Intelligence and Publishing Intelligence,” featuring Daunt as the sole bookseller alongside Sonia Draga, Founder and Owner of Sonia Draga Publishing House and President of the Federation of European Publishers; Brian Murray, President and CEO of HarperCollins and Chair of the Association of American Publishers; David Shelley, CEO of Hachette Book Group; and Stefano Mauri, President of Messaggerie Italiano and President and CEO of Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol (GeMS) who coordinated the panel.

The topic was created by Mauri who defined it at the start of the discussion as “the intelligence of many, many, many passionate people, curious about what’s new, what’s going on, how the readers are changing, [like this school]” in comparison, or perhaps conflict with the impact of artificial intelligence.

“I cannot imagine a world in which everybody uses artificial intelligence except publishers. I think that publishers will have to use in a professional way with a lot of sensitivity about preserving the human quality of the editorial side,” said Mauri.

The discussion centered on how the industry navigates the space between innovation and regulation.

On the one hand, Murray wants publishers to dictate the future rather than waiting for lawsuits to be settled and change implemented. He sees the opportunities, highlighting the future possibility to “build new writer’s streams for them as we go forward” through licensing and other opportunities “I think that’s a role that a publisher should play in the future. I think there are going to be new markets for all of us to develop on behalf of the authors that we work with.”

Draga and Mauri were less focused on the opportunities and more concerned about the protection for publishers and authors.

With regulations around technology in Europe being stronger than those in the US, Draga noted, “the AI Act that was approved two years ago was not really defending our rights. It was an act that acknowledged the fact that AI exists and there are some infringements but was not really clearly protecting our rights. And there were no mentioning of remuneration.”

“Most European publishers are small and we are too small to fight against big tech companies. So, well, we should come out with some initiatives that maybe combine the forces of many publishers from different countries and to try to sue the big techs as a general international case, if that is ever possible.”

Mauri seconded that and also brought it back to the opportunities that HarperCollins saw for their authors when they entered into a licensing agreement in 2024 with an unnamed technology company for select backlist nonfiction books.

“Instead of waiting 10 years and being deprived of our creativity [while AI companies take copies of our books from pirated sites], you want to use my book for training your AI, fantastic. You will pay this license yearly and for every use case,” said Mauri.

“That would be, of course, the perfect world for publishers and for authors to have a reliable stream of money for the use of their jobs. And maybe, maybe this would force this tech company to make a selection of what they feed the machine with.”

Shelley noted that it isn’t just an issue between publishers and the tech companies, but one of the larger literary ecosystem, “We’ve now got to really get behind kind of every effort that we possibly can do to enforce it and to make, I suppose, both a legal argument and also a public argument about it.”

“I think there’s obviously what goes on in courts. I think the music industry has been very strong in this kind of doing things just to educate the public about the importance of copyright and how copyright applies to AI. So I think those two things need to sort of go hand in hand.”

And, that might be where bookstores come in. Daunt noted that AI didn’t play much of a role in the business of bookselling (with the exception of streamlining some workflow), but the interaction with customers which was at the heart the week’s training program might be one in which readers could be educated and sought to add more perspective on both the regulation and the opportunity for AI.

Mauri closed out the discussion by saying that the only way publishers could move forward to protect their interests and those of their authors is to work together across borders, which he hopes to see soon.

To watch a recording of Friday’s program, visit the website here.