4.5 Million Italians Have Read an eBook in the Past Three Months

14.01.2016 Nate Hoffelder 4 Comments

A new report from Italy’s National Institute for Statistics reveals that ebook adoption in Italy lags far behind the US, Japan, or other countries.

Based on interviews conducted recently, the report concluded that  "42% of people aged 6 and over (24 million est.) have read at least one book in the 12 months preceding the interview, for purposes other than school or work". That is about the same number as last year’s report, but also significantly lower than Pew Research Center’s latest figures for the US (over 70%). The report also found that 9.1% of the Italian households do not own any books, while 64.4% own 100 books at most.

And the figures are worse for ebooks. Only an estimated 8.2% of the population have read an ebook in the past three months (around 4.5 million people), compared to 14.1% of those who surfed the Internet in the last three months. Similar surveys conducted in the US and Japan showed rates three times higher in those respective countries.

Germany, on the other hand, showed a much lower adoption rate, with only 2.9 million consumers over the age of ten having read an ebook in the past year. What with Germany’s higher population (81 million to Italy’s 61 million), that is a huge difference.

Edit: No, sorry,  that was 2.9 million ebook buyers in Germany.. The correct stat for readership is a quarter of Germans reading ebooks.

There’s no info on the amount that Italians spent on ebooks, but the press release does say that Italian households spent 3.3 billion euros for books and 5.3 billion euros for newspapers in 2014. That is down by 18% from 2011.

P.S. The above came from the English-language press release. Additional detail is available in Italian on a 1990’s era website. I’m still trying to navigate it, and I will post more info when I find it.

InfoDocket

image by davidMonroy