Although the 2012 reform had laid the foundations for a massive technological transition within Italian school classrooms (at least on paper), the data that emerged from the recent AGCM fact-finding survey (Competition and Market Guarantor Authority) photograph a very different and decidedly static reality. Although on paper over 95% of Italian classes have adopted mixed format textbooks, i.e. which provide for the integration between paper and digital content, the actual activation of licenses to access online materials stops at a small, if not ridiculous, percentage of just 16%. This enormous gap between real and potential use is the result of very specific structural and economic barriers that the Antitrust has brought to light.
The investigation, carried out by consulting the MIM (Ministry of Education and Merit), the publishers and the IEA (Italian Publishers Association), has revealed an extremely concentrated market characterized by dynamics that penalize families first and foremost, who find themselves incurring an average expense that varies from 580 to 1,250 euros per school cycle. The critical issues highlighted mainly concern the poor interoperability of the platforms, the limitations placed on the second-hand market through the management of digital licenses and a regulation on discounts which, paradoxically, reduces competition instead of encouraging it. Analyzing the Authority’s report in detail, it clearly emerges how the current system slows down innovation, hindering the spread of open educational resources and keeping the physical weight of books (and costs) on the shoulders of students and their families.
Looking further into the economic dynamics of the sector, we find ourselves faced with a sector that moves impressive figures, involving around one million teachers and almost eight million students annually. The overall value generated by the sale of new books stands at around 800 million euros per year, while the second-hand market covers a slice of around 150 million. Analyzing the structure of the offer, we note a very strong concentration of the market in a handful of publishers. This is the photograph of the market taken by the AGCM:
The market is very concentrated, with the publishing houses Mondadori, Zanichelli, Sanoma and La Scuola holding a total of over 80%.
This oligopoly situation inevitably influences prices which, although growing in line with inflation, weigh more and more on family budgets due to the general erosion of purchasing power. To complicate the picture, the current legislation sets a maximum ceiling of 15% for discounts on the cover price; according to the AGCM, this limitation, initially designed to protect the supply chain, ends up damaging the final consumer, preventing collective bargaining between publishers and retailers that could reduce costs more significantly.
The crux of the investigation, however, concerns the technological barriers that caused the digital flop. The failure to activate licenses is largely due to commercial policies that hinder the reuse of texts. When we talk about poor interoperability, we are referring to the technical difficulty of making different platforms communicate with each other: students and teachers often find themselves having to manage multiple accounts and non-communicating interfaces to access content from different publishers, creating a friction that discourages the use of digital. To complete the work, then, there are the current licensing conditions which strongly penalize the second-hand market and loan for use (i.e. the temporary free concession of the book), since the access codes to online content often expire or are not transferable to the second owner of the paper volume. Faced with this evidence, publishers have shown an openness towards solutions that allow licenses to be reactivated at controlled prices and to extend the duration of access, a move that the Authority hopes will become the standard.
Another fundamental aspect on which the Antitrust has placed emphasis is the unexpressed potential of OER, an acronym for Open Educational Resources. These are teaching, learning and research materials that are in the public domain or released under a license that allows their free use, re-adaptation and redistribution. Together with school self-production, these resources could drastically reduce costs for families and, thanks to integration with new artificial intelligence tools, promote personalized teaching. The current legislation does not offer sufficient incentives to make these alternatives take off, which therefore struggle to compete with traditional commercial publishing.
We close on a positive note, which comes from the proposal of modular solutions: the idea is to break down textbooks into lighter files or to resort to the use of QR Codes to transfer part of the contents to digital, thus reducing the weight of backpacks (which in Italy is double the European average).
