The 38th edition of what Italians call the Salone del Libro di Torino arrives in May with an expanded professional programme, a Netflix partnership, and a second AI conference.
Italy’s largest book fair turns 38 this year. The Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino (to give it its Italian name, which the fair’s own trademarked identity uses, Torino being the Italian city that English speakers anglicise as Turin) – runs from 14 to 18 May at the Lingotto Fiere, the landmark former Fiat factory that has anchored the event since the early 1990s.
And this year’s edition is, by almost any measure, the most ambitious the fair has mounted.
Before getting to the professional programme, which is what brings publishers and agents to Torino rather than just readers, some context is useful.
The fair was founded in 1988 by entrepreneur Guido Accornero and bookseller Angelo Pezzana, with a vision of establishing Italy’s premier publishing event modelled on major European fairs such as Frankfurt and London – a southern European counterpart to the dominant northern fairs, one that emphasised encounters between authors, publishers, and readers rather than pure commercial exhibition.
By 2015, it was drawing more than 341,000 visitors and over 1,400 exhibitors. Post-pandemic recovery has been strong: the 2024 edition drew 222,000 people across 800 stands in 51 halls, hosting more than 2,000 events including 180 workshops on site and a further 650 events across the surrounding city.
The 2025 edition surpassed that: 231,000 attendees, more than 2,500 on-site events across 70 venues, with 315 events sold out. The economic footprint is considerable too – recent data indicate an economic impact exceeding €92 million on Torino, tripling the direct impact recorded a decade earlier.
The fair runs simultaneously as a mass public event and as a serious trade fair – a dual identity that shapes everything about its professional programming. It is honest about this, describing itself as “Italy’s largest public-facing fair looking forward to opening its doors to publishers, authors, and, above all, readers.” That transparency is actually rather admirable. A fair that knows what it is tends to do it well, and Torino does both halves well.
Frankfurt of course famously parades as the world’s largest trade fair, but actually splits between trade and public halves. Lately attendance has been pretty evenly split between trade nd public visitors (at different times).
In a recent interview with Emma Lowe, Director of the London Book Fair, Nathan Hull asked whether the LBF might go down that route, and while she didn’t rule it out, the odds are stacked against it.
I do hope she reconsiders as she consolidates her role after the musical chairs games with LBF directors in recent years. London likely doesn’t have venues big enough for a UK Book Fair, but Birmingham does, and what a blast that would be! Germany’s biggest book fair is not in Berlin, Italy’s biggest book fair is not in Rome…
Reflecting on the just finished London Book Fair, remarkable for not having any complaints about not enough seats, Thaddeus McIlroy questioned just what trade book fairs are for in the age of AI, something I explored further here.
Regular TNPS readers will know my thoughts on the declining relevance of the LBF in recent years as events people with no knowledge of the trade were tasked with running the show. LBF had been in freefall since Jacks Thomas departed for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair show, and on occasion I despaired if LBF even had a future.
Emma Lowe’s engagement, hopefully for the next decade, is reassuring, but still Thad McIlroy’s sentiments carry weight.
At a time when book fairs globally are managing to be trade and public-facing events, London is no longer at the centre of publishing gravity, with Frankfurt and Bologna holding the western fort while Sharjah Book Authority | هيئة الشارقة للكتاب and Chennai International Book Fair (Official) position themselves as the regional hubs that connect the west with East and South East Asia and also pivot towards Africa and Latin America.
Amid this transition in global publishing industry influence, fairs like Torino are worthy of special attention as they show how to bridge the trade and public gap.
The Rights Centre
The professional heart of the Torino fair is the Rights Centre, which opens two days before the public event – this year running 13 to 15 May at the Lingotto Congress Centre. This is where the international trade actually happens.
Last year, 450 publishing professionals from 38 countries registered on the matching platform: 42 from film production companies, 147 from literary and scouting agencies, and 261 publishers, resulting in over 4,000 meetings. For 2026, the fair has added NORLA (Norwegian Literature Abroad) to its institutional relationships for the first time, alongside existing ties with the Institut Français, Instituto Cervantes, Goethe-Institut, Literature Ireland, and the Polish Book Institute.
The fellowship programme, supported by ITA – the Italian Trade Agency – is a significant part of what makes the Rights Centre work. This year, the press release confirms, 85 publishing professionals from 34 countries will participate in the Rights Centre’s activities with ITA support, a meaningful number for a mid-sized fair that competes for international attention against Frankfurt and London.
The fellowship has historically included not just matchmaking access but cultural immersion in the Piedmont region – dinners at historic venues and curated introductions to the region have been part of the offering, which speaks to something Torino understands that some other fairs do not: professionals who enjoy a fair come back.
The Rights Centre’s relationship with audiovisual rights has been a particular area of growth. The fair launched a Book to Screen fellowship as far back as 2018, under Eurimages patronage, bringing audiovisual producers and publishing professionals together for structured encounters. That commitment deepens significantly this year.
Netflix in the Building
The headline professional programme addition for 2026 is a Netflix partnership – described in the press release as “an exciting program of events exploring the potential of the relationship between publishing and audiovisual entertainment.” The details remain to be announced, but the significance is not hard to read.
Netflix’s presence at a book fair is not purely a statement of cultural goodwill. The streamer has been one of the most active converters of literary IP in the world, and rights professionals who attend Torino are acutely aware of that pipeline. Having Netflix in the room – not as a panel topic but as a programmatic partner – signals that the fair is positioning itself as a genuine junction point between publishing and screen production rather than a venue that merely observes the trend from a distance. For scouts, agents, and publishers with optionable titles, this is consequential.
Let me bring in the broader context here. The relationship between publishing and streaming has moved well beyond the simple “book to film” model of previous decades. Streaming platforms now commission directly, develop original IP, and think about adaptation at the acquisition stage. A book fair that can create structured conversations between publishers and a major streamer is offering something real, not decorative.
AI: A Second Conference
Less glamorous but arguably more consequential for the day-to-day business of publishing, this year’s professional programme includes the second edition of the fair’s conference on artificial intelligence’s impact on publishing. Last year’s inaugural edition took place at OGR Turin; the 2026 edition is again scheduled for 13 May, before the Rights Centre formally opens.
The fact that this is a second edition matters. Many fairs have staged AI panels as a form of headline-chasing; fewer have committed to building a sustained, recurring dialogue with the publishing industry about how AI actually changes workflows, rights, contracts, and the economics of content creation. Torino is in the latter category. The AI conference arrives before the Rights Centre opens deliberately, giving professionals a shared frame of reference before they sit down at negotiating tables where AI clauses in contracts are increasingly present.
Not to mention increasingly in the news!
The New Business Infrastructure
Beyond the headline partnerships, the 2026 programme includes structural investments in professional infrastructure that deserve attention. The new Business Area represents the most explicit acknowledgment yet that Torino is developing a genuine trade fair layer within its public-facing event – what the press release calls “a fair inside the fair for publishers and industry professionals.” The design intent is to create meeting and discussion space for publishers, booksellers, librarians, distributors, promoters, and service providers, moving beyond the networking-in-corridors model that characterises most book fair professional engagement.
The Publishers Centre, introduced in 2025 and continued this year, offers dedicated working and meeting space with structured elements: speed dating sessions with booksellers, companies, and influencers, and short consulting sessions oriented at helping publishers navigate market changes. These may sound modest, but in practice the structured speed-dating format has proved one of the more useful professional innovations at several fairs over the past few years – it creates encounters that would otherwise not happen, between parties who often occupy the same building for five days without ever speaking.
The professional programme also provides space for trade association activities: ALI (the Italian Booksellers Association) and the Association of Independent Publishers will hold closed members’ meetings at the fair, and AIE (the Italian Publishers Association) presents its traditional book market data analysis on Friday morning.
The Public Programme as Professional Context
There is a reason to pay attention to the public programme even if you are attending Torino purely as a trade professional, and that reason is what it tells you about the Italian market. Annalena Benini, reconfirmed as editorial director for a further three-year term through 2026, has brought a particular curatorial intelligence to the fair since taking the helm in 2024. Her first edition, themed “Imaginary Life,” was widely praised. The 2026 edition is titled The World Saved by Kids, drawing on Elsa Morante’s 1968 novel of the same name – a choice that is both a programmatic statement and, in the current global climate, something closer to a political one.
Benini has entrusted the thematic section to a group of curators aged between 19 and 23 – a decision that is either a very good idea or a very interesting experiment, and possibly both. On a personal note I would have handed the task to 3-12 year olds, because they are all our future readers. But this is a step in the right direction, and something we could never hope to see at London with the current structural limitations to management. Whether Emma Lowe can break out of that straight-jacket remains to be seen.
The keynote comes from Zadie Smith, whose lecture is titled “Everything Was Extreme. And It Still Is. A Reflection on Adolescence.” Erin Cox beat me to that story over in Publishing Perspectives while I was distracted by school matters here in The Gambia (when TNPS and school demands clash the children always win). The international guest list is substantial; the Italian list, from Niccolò Ammaniti to Sandro Veronesi, reflects the depth of Italian literary culture that the Rights Centre exists to bring to the world’s attention.
Greece is Guest of Honour, with authors including Petros Markaris and Dimitris Dimitriadis. The fair has developed its guest-of-honour programme with care – it is a genuine showcase rather than a diplomatic formality.
Worth Your Attention
TNPS will be following the Salone’s professional programme closely as May approaches and will publish further analysis as the full programme becomes available from 1 April.
For a fair of this scale and ambition – 2,000 guests from around the world, some 1,200 events, 147,000 square metres of space – the level of attention it receives in the English-language trade press remains disproportionately low. That is partly an industry habit, partly a language barrier, but mostly a self-fulfilling dynamic by which overlooked fairs receive less coverage and therefore remain overlooked.
The Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino is a major European publishing event. It runs a serious rights market, it has made a genuine commitment to professional infrastructure, and this year it has Netflix and a recurring AI conference as part of a programme that goes well beyond the press release. It merits a closer look.
Full programme details for the 38th Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino will be published at salonelibro.it from 1 April. The Rights Centre runs 13–15 May; the public-facing fair runs 14–18 May. TNPS will return with further analysis as the event approaches.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Analysis newsletter.
