At New Delhi Book Fair, Kevin Fizgerald, Director of WIPO’s Information and Digital Outreach Division, presented the latest publishing sector data gathered by WIPO for the year 2021 and was joined on stage by IPA Secretary General, José Borghino, and the chair of IPA’s Data and Statistics Committee, Pranav Gupta.

In his opening presentation Mr Fitzgerald focused on the insight that the report gave into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the indications of sector recovery. This brought the total revenues for the 21 countries covered to 71.6 billion USD with some markets registering impressive growth over 2020 revenues. He went on to look at the evolution of industry revenues by format and sales channel, noting the continued evolution of digital format revenues.

You can read the full WIPO report here [link updated on 31 March 2023, following corrections to data for Brazil, India and Italy in table 4].

Pranav Gupta chaired the following discussion which feature IPA Secretary General, José Borghino alongside Monica Malhotra, the Managing Director of MBD group, and Vikrant Mathur, the Executive Director of Nielsen Book Data India.

In his remarks Borghino underlined the difficulty of gathering comparable data on the book sector and thanked WIPO for dedicating time and resources over the last 7 years to build their publishing industry survey. He underlined the importance of data for the sector to be able to tell its story effectively. He thanked Pranav Gupta for taking on the chairmanship of IPA’s new Data and Statistics Committee which hopes to reduce the number of data black spots.