“An unnecessary and harmful provision, burdening the supply chain without delivering real benefits to families.” Thus the president of the Italian Association of Publishers (AIE) Innocenzo Cipolletta calls for the cancellation of the provision contained in the Budget Bill, at Article 105, which requires publishers to provide textbooks for school and university students in a digitally printable version at 50% of the cover price of the corresponding paper edition.
“We are astonished,” he continues, “that without any prior consultation a measure is being introduced that harms publishers, booksellers, and authors, and that is built in total disregard for the category of educational and academic publishers and for copyright, for the fair remuneration due for the intellectual work of those who write, illustrate, lay out, update and edit these texts, and whose value and development costs – we reiterate, even if it should be clear – are certainly not only the value of the paper on which they are printed.”
The president of AIE concludes: “We wonder how it is possible to introduce, without ever having initiated a discussion, a measure that causes grave damage to the entire book supply chain, without delivering real benefits to families. For all these reasons and for the social relevance, and not only industrial, of the educational and academic publishing sector, we can only ask for its cancellation.”
ALI Confcommercio Booksellers: “An unnecessary and harmful regulation”
Soon after, Paolo Ambrosini, president of ALI Confcommercio, describes it as “a regulation that, at least in its intentions, aims to curb the cost of schooling, yet risks creating new problems for families and for the entire book supply chain.” He adds: “Once again a sector is being intervened in without any prior discussion with those who represent and know it. A choice that could harm publishers, booksellers, authors and all players in the supply chain, without guaranteeing real savings for families. Because a book is not made only of paper: behind every volume there are intellectual labor, planning, updating, editing, distribution and a network of businesses and professionals.”
For Ambrosini, “the paradox is also economic. A book with a cover price of 25 euros could be bought in digital form for 12.50 euros, but to obtain a printed copy families would also have to bear the printing cost. For a 200–300 page volume, an additional 16–20 euros could be expected. The result? A total expense potentially higher than the price of the book bought in a bookstore.”
“We ask ourselves what concrete advantage there is for students and families. Cui prodest? We risk introducing a mechanism that does not solve the problem of the dear school, but merely shifts costs onto families and the economic consequences onto businesses,” emphasizes the president of ALI Confcommercio.
The impact on the network of bookstores would be especially worrying, he adds: “the sector represented by ALI Confcommercio involves over 12,000 operators and more than 4,400 points of sale, not counting the downstream effects.” And again: “From the Finance Law and the Government, businesses expect solutions, support, and conditions to continue investing and creating work, not new problems and measures that risk upsetting the balance of entire economic sectors. You cannot think to tackle a social problem by shifting its costs onto companies that every day guarantee services, employment, and cultural presence in the territories.”
ALI Confcommercio reiterates its proposal: introducing a 19% tax deduction on expenses for the purchase of books, whether school-related or not. “A measure that would concretely help families while at the same time supporting the entire supply chain and the spread of reading.”
“Our proposal has a flaw: it requires public resources. But that is precisely what we expect from a government: to invest to solve citizens’ problems and support businesses, not to seek shortcuts at the expense of others’ work…,” declares Ambrosini, who concludes: “ALI Confcommercio therefore calls for the cancellation of the provision and the immediate opening of discussions with the representatives of the supply chain. The high cost of schooling is a real problem and must be addressed with effective tools, not with regulations that risk producing new damage without delivering concrete benefits.”
