Antonio Tombolini, Simplicissimus Book Farm's CEO has been interviewed about digital publishing by the International Publishers Association in one of their monthly newsletters.

1. Italy’s e-book market
An interview with Antonio Tombolini, Founder & CEO, Simplicissimus Book Farm
In 2006, Antonio Tombolini suspected that book publishing
would soon encounter the same challenges which the music
industry had faced in its transition to digital. Since then, his
firm, Simplicissimus, has been developing tools for e-book
production, distribution and retail.
In 2010 he launched an e-book distribution platform, STEALTH,
which allows publishers to manage e-book sales and
marketing. The new Narcissus.me platform provides similar
services for the self-publishing market. With over 30,000 titles,
Simplicissimus has become Italy’s largest e-book distributor.
IPA: Antonio, tell us about your mission at Simplicissimus.
Nowadays, content is more and more liquid. You can think of me as a "digital plumber": content wants to
flow, and we are in the business of letting it do so in the most efficient way, from creators to users.
IPA: How has the e-book market developed in Italy, compared to in other countries?
While the e-book market is small, compared to the US and UK markets, there is a very interesting pattern
of development: what’s happening now is exactly what happened in the US four years ago. E-books
represent more than 30% in value of the trade books market in the US, and more than 20% in the UK,
but in 2013 that value was a mere 3.5% in Western Europe. We already have 6% e-book penetration in
Italy after the 1st half of 2014, and expect to close the year somewhere between 6 and 7% of the trade
books market, making it a €60-70 million market, compared with €30 Million in 2013 and €11M in 2012.
At Simplicissimus, the value of monthly sales of e-books has grown 1500% in 3 years. If we set January
2011’s sales value at 100 euros, by March 2014 it had become 1500.

2. Trade e-books market value
2014: €60-70 million (est.)
2013: €30 million
2012: €11 million
In Italy, as elsewhere in Continental Europe, approximately 10% of
available titles are already digital. Publishers have tended not to
convert their backlist until now, but they will. The average e-book price
is converging around €4.99 per title. Sadly, major publishers tend to
remain conservative, if not hostile, about the digital market: with that
kind of attitude they risk suffering from the transition to digital rather
than being able to exploit its opportunities.
IPA: How do publishers’ mentalities and business models need to change, for the industry to remain
viable in the digital economy?
I'm a strong supporter of the "digital first" paradigm: thanks to the low costs involved in producing and
distributing e-books, publishers could be bolder in publishing more titles, from more authors, in more
genres. They can experiment at a very low level of risk. Modern digital printing (Print On Demand) will do
the rest, once an e-book has demonstrated its appeal.
What publishers shouldn’t be doing is getting embroiled in disputes with Amazon. You cannot blame the
actor that invested in and created the e-book market as we know it! Instead of moaning and
complaining, publishers should ask themselves: how can we sell e-books to users in a complementary
way, leaving direct competition with Amazon to players like Apple, Google, Kobo?
What I have in mind is the development of an ecommerce platform for digital books which works like
"street trade". But instead of selling books in a bookstore (where you have to get people to a specific
physical location, which is difficult and costly) why not disseminate "e-book stalls" around the web? I’m
thinking of a very easy, copy & paste widget which allows content to be sold directly to readers.
IPA: What is your sense of how reading and buying habits will evolve in the next 5 years?
I'm a big fan of the good old book: content produced by one or more authors, made almost exclusively of
text, with a beginning and a (more or less) happy end. This is my definition of "trade books", and we can
preserve it for the future thanks to the digital technology we have in our hands today. The ability to
combine audio with the text you're reading will be soon a key feature. I'm less convinced by the
"enhanced e-books" hype: it costs too much to produce those books, and once you add video,
interactivity, geo-localization etc... to a story, it's no longer a book for me, but a videogame! And
videogames are better produced by specialists.
IPA: What about the outlook for self-publishing? How do you see its future?
Self-publishing is booming everywhere, Italy included. In 2013, our Narcissus.me platform published
more new titles than Italy’s biggest publisher (Mondadori Group), and it's still growing! That said, I'm not
a fan of self-publishing emphasizing the "indie" part of the story: self-publishers are becoming more and
more *publishers* themselves: new publishers, digital-first publishers. While they start out publishing
just their own books, we already see self-publishers who are particularly good at doing specific jobs
offering their services to other authors: they are the publishers of the (near) future! They find it natural
to think in terms of digital-first, freed from the constraints of traditional publishing groups.
24th
July 2014