To bring the new generations closer to the written page by consolidating “an audience of readers for tomorrow”. This is the challenge of publishers to ‘seduce’, through the wisdom hidden in books, children accustoming them to the slow time of reading. A few days before the World Book and Copyright Day, which will fall next Saturday, Ricardo Franco Levi, president of the AIE, the Italian Publishers Association, considers this the test to deal with in the months to come. A proof that is based on the certainty that “the quality of a whole society and a nation is reflected in the reading and approach to the book”. The challenge for publishers, therefore Levi says to AdnKronos, is to “win over the kids who are the readers of tomorrow and who, in the age group ranging from 13-14 to 22-23, drop a little in reading, starting to find many other opportunities for entertainment. We must get the book to become an element of fun and distinction and that it can be fashionable, so to speak. Children are used to very limited temporal modules of communication which are not always the same of reading “. Reversing the course is therefore a real commitment “to consolidate an audience of readers for tomorrow”. Moving from the times that will come to the results achieved so far, it must be said that, in recent months, the book market has shown signs of ‘fatigue’. Indeed, the AIE itself recently provided data indicating a slowdown in sales, underlining that “in the first three months of 2022 the Italian publishing industry of various kinds, or novels and essays sold in physical and online bookstores and in large-scale distribution, is a decrease of 3.7% in value and 2.3% in number of copies compared to the first three months of 2021, which had recorded a particularly positive trend “. “The data – observes the president of the AIE – have signaled a certain slowdown”. This is “a minus sign compared to a particularly lively year for the book in the season of the pandemic which saw the end of all other cultural consumption. So, in the return to normality, it was also to be expected that there could be a slowdown”. A reflection which is linked to the awareness that the general situation so far matured “compared to the year before the pandemic is still with largely positive data. Certainly the future, and also the immediate future, is full of worries”, however Levi warns . Concerns that are based on various critical issues that could crack the book market. Criticalities, underlines the president of the AIE, ranging “from the increase in raw materials, that is paper and logistics, to the spending power of families”. In this scenario, Levi acknowledges that, in the years of the pandemic, the institutions have pursued a policy of the book that “has even been taken as a model in Europe”. A policy that has resulted in several concrete interventions, the first of which was “the declaration of the book as an essential asset that allowed bookstores to be kept open even in the days of the lockdown”. Levi also mentions “support for demand” which has been channeled into various initiatives now made permanent. That is, “App 18, the teacher’s charter, help to libraries for the purchase of books in local bookstores, initiatives that have helped to support the market and which now, and this is also an element of satisfaction, they have become permanent becoming a structural element of the book market “. Faced with the amount of interventions implemented for the world of books, Levi asks “on the one hand to continue with this policy and on the other to imagine and study ways to extend support for the purchase of books beyond eighteen-year-olds, perhaps widening the audience of the ages. The system law promoted by Minister Franceschini is also at stake, and which hopefully will be fulfilled in this legislature “. A law that could help define “a framework of certainty and support for investments in the world of the book similar to that which has existed for the entire film industry with a law for the sector”, he concludes. (By Carlo Roma)