Month: December 2010

Mondadori and Google have signed a partnership that will make Mondadori Group’s wealth of Italian trade books available in electronic format around the world through Google Books and Google eBooks.

This partnership makes Mondadori, the biggest Italian publisher, to join Google Books and Google eBooks programme, and it means that a wealth of Italian literature and culture will be full text searchable and available for sale to readers around the world.

Google Books is already available in Italy and through Google Books readers around the world will be able to search for and find Mondadori Books through Google, to see an online preview of the books and to purchase physical copies of these books through online and physical retailers. Google eBooks–Google’s online bookstore–will launch in Europe in 2011. Through today’s announcement, Google will also sell Mondadori ebooks.

The trade catalogue of the Mondadori Group (Edizioni Mondadori, Einaudi, Sperling & Kupfer and Edizioni Piemme) includes over 10,000 titles, 1600 of which are already available as ebooks. All of the titles in the catalogue will gradually form part of the Google Books programme.

Mondadori is the leading company in the Italian book market with a share of 28.4% in 2009. The Group’s editorial production is mainly focused on fiction and essays, paperbacks and children’s books, with over 2000 new titles every year.

“The partnership with Google represents confirmation of Mondadori’s focus on growth and innovative solutions”, stated CEO of the Mondadori Group, Maurizio Costa. “Consistent with this vision we have decided to join forces with an authoritative platform such as the one belonging to Google both to offer a preview of our titles and to make the considerable range of titles produced by our publishing houses available for purchase”, he continued. “The agreement with Google without doubt represents a significant opportunity to promote the quality of our content and our editorial production on a large scale”, concluded Costa.

“This is a fantastic step for the promotion of Italian culture, and it will mean more opportunity for Italian writers, and readers around the globe,” said Santiago de la Mora, Director of Google Books for EMEA. “We want Google eBooks to help stimulate the online books environment, and by working with important publishers like Mondadori we can achieve this goal.”

With Google eBooks, readers can discover and buy books from the Google eBookstore or independent online booksellers who have partnered with Google. This provides a myriad of ways for books to be discovered and purchased online. Whether a consumer buys a Google eBook from Google or from an online bookseller, they are all stored in a single online library. Readers can view their Google eBooks on devices from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers.

The mobile advertising campaign of iPad applications by Edizioni Piemme, whose catalogue of titles available from Apple’s Appstore will reach eleven titles by Christmas, has been launched on Mediamond websites. In details the campaign has been planned on the Mondadori web and mobile sites held by the advertising sales agency, accessible on the iPad.

The focus of the initiative will be on some of the most successful titles of Edizioni Piemme, such as Storie da ridere and the bestseller Nel Regno della Fantasia of the popular children’s character Geronimo Stilton’s; Il cacciatore di acquiloni by Khaled Hosseini and the autobiographical A un passo dal baratro by Paolo Brosio.

“We are delighted to be able to promote our applications on the Mediamond network,” declared Laura Donnini managing director of Edizioni Piemme.
“It is the first campaign for our mobile applications and we believe that the launch of the applications of our books will certainly benefit in terms of visibility and downloads,” she concluded.

Satisfaction was also expressed by Davide Mondo, managing director of Mediamond, who said, “Our product portfolio is clearly the ideal platform for the realisation of an application advertising campaign. With the tools we have available we have designed an immediate communication campaign that focuses on the interests of the users that visit Mondadori’s digital properties,” he concluded.

Edizioni Piemme has a consolidated leadership in children’s book publishing, with a market share of 18% (Source: Nielsen November 2010), thanks to the success of the “Il Battello a Vapore” and “Geronimo Stilton” brands, as well as its successes in the fiction, non-fiction and religion sectors for general readers.

Mediamond, the joint venture between Mondadori Pubblicità and Publitalia ’80, was set up in 2009 for the sale of advertising on the web. Mediamond’s portfolio is made up of a network of 30 titles that every month reach more than 8.4 million users and 710 million page views, which represents a 35% coverage of internet users.

Bol.it, the digital bookstore that brings together the best of Italian and international publishing, and Zelanda, the company that is responsible for the web management of the “Zelig” and “Smemoranda” brands, have joined forces for a new space dedicated to reading.

The agreement will lead to the creation, on the Bol.it site, of a digital space to share readings, a love for words and authors and a passion for the capacity to tell and read stories. The space will allow users to buy books, music, films, magazines (both print and digital) and provide an opportunity to talk about, debate and comment on them, bringing together videos, blogs, lists and communication approaches inspired by social networks where Bol.it users will find the mechanisms for relationships built around reading of which they are an intrinsic part.

Bol.it will become a new place of meeting and will create a more lively and original way of enjoying all things cultural; bringing the process of buying, recommending, criticising and loving a book inside a social network setting, with people united by a shared enthusiasm. The users of Bol.it will be able to transform their cultural pursuits by using everything they find on the site, such as profiles for the 350,000 titles in the catalogue, book-trailers, interviews, cultural events in streaming, personalised lists and favourite quotations. All of which animated and enlivened by the kind of content – under the Zelanda brand – that represents the best of Italian comedy and entertainment.

This partnership will make it possible to reach out to a young, curious and dynamic audience that uses the internet extensively but is perhaps less used to reading. And at the same time it will provide a pleasant, reliable and professional meeting place for an older audience, perhaps less familiar with the digital world, but strongly motivated by a love of books.

“The aim is absolutely clear,” claimed Vittorio Veltroni, general manager of Mondadori Digital, “just as the digitalisation of music has led to an improvement in its distribution and a substantial increase in consumption, so the digitalisation of books (in its physical form and marketing) provides an opportunity to bring generations together and to increase the consumption of culture, stories, words, inspiration and passion.”

“The most amazing thing, and the great gamble, about the web is the pleasure of being part of it and knowing it not “in place of” the printed word, but “in addition to” it. To communicate, get more detailed information and exchange views on the internet can lead to a considerable improvement of our relationship with books. Our efforts are focused and will continue to focus on valorising the printed book without denying, on the contrary. Encouraging the progress that the web has brought with all of its applications, including commercial ones,” declared Gino & Michele, the creators and co-directors of “Smemoranda” and, for more than 10 years the authors of “Zelig”. “We have accepted the proposal from Vittorio Veltroni to make our contribution with Zelanda to the new Bol.it project with a mixture of curiosity and expectation. The curiosity of seeing whether our skills and, sometimes, intuitions will be able to make the leap into a world that is generationally far from us as the new technology generation is. And the expectation that we can make a contribution, however small, to expanding culture and attracting and drawing in those who are currently, for whatever reason, far away from the world of books and reading.”

The joy of knowledge,from history and medicine to technology and sport.

From Thursday 16 December 2010, Italia 1 will broadcast in prime time “Focus Uno”, a programme made in conjunction with the popular science monthly Focus, published by Gruner+Jahr/Mondadori and edited by Sandro Boeri, which is aimed at those who want to discover and know more about the world we live in.

Italy’s most widely-read magazine makes its first move into television with a new and revolutionary programme that deals with a huge range of interesting issues, including technology, science, history, sport, nature, health, sex, the animal kingdom and much else. An endless and fascinating overview made with reportage, first-hand accounts, astounding internationally produced documentaries and exclusive documents.

There will also be a large number of features produced in-house dedicated to the most extravagant and amusing curiosities.

Presented by Giulio Golia, “Focus Uno” is a new format that maintains the popular and authoritative style of the magazine Focus, and follows the same editorial line: to inform, discover, ask daring questions, provide comprehensible answers, and broaden knowledge while also being entertaining.

From puncturing myths about sex, to the most bizarre deaths explained from a scientific point of view; from unexamined aspects of human behaviour that we take for granted, to the most innovative and original aspects of the world of insects; from the infinite range of unexplained phenomena, to metropolitan legends about the food that we eat and our daily lives, to unique and extraordinarily spectacular natural events; and from the most innovative and creative proposals from the world of renewable energy, to extraordinary images from the world of animals and their natural habitat.

As well as documentaries on the most surprising and varied subjects – personality disorders, lightning, space as seen from a satellite, hyper-technological cars – and features on the new frontiers in the prevention and most recent developments in medicine and pharmacology.

So, don’t forget to tune in from Thursday 16 December 2010 to Italia 1 in prima time for four episodes of “Focus Uno”.

Focus Uno is a programme by YAM112003, produced in association with the popular science magazine Focus for ITALIA 1. Editorial supervision for features of a medical-scientific nature is provided by Intermedia.

Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. today announced that it has made available, at both the company’s headquarters and Borsa Italiana S.p.A., the minutes of the extraordinary part of the Shareholders’ Meeting held the last 11 November 2010.

The above-mentioned documentation is also available at the website www.gruppomondadori.it (‘Governance’ section).

R101 is changing its skin and from today will focus even more on the concept of “Adult Contemporary Radio”, a radio station designed and produced for a target in the 25-54 year-old age range.

New positioning and stationality

The new positioning of R101, run since September by station manager Guido Monti, will initially involve the focusing and implementation of the playlist.

The aim of the new R101 is to create an elaborate and well-balanced mix tailored to this specific target, which came to adulthood with the best music ever and consequently will not settle for anything less, while also wanting to experience and enjoy to the full the life and music of today.

“I think that guaranteeing quality music that is able to deeply touch the emotions is just the first step of a long path in which we aim to involve the audience, by betting on less rationality and a bigger emotional impact,” declared Guido Monti.

“A relationship that encourages the listener’s engagement, leaving space for the imagination and the evocation of “personal worlds”, underlined Monti.

“In competitive context like we are in today,” he continued, “innovation – even if it may seem paradoxical – means returning to a concentration on the element that gave birth to commercial radio: music. Together with the efforts of the whole team, imagination and, above all, passion and enthusiasm, we are moving towards the objective of serving the audience, day by day.

Of course, this is just the first of a series of new things that, from January, will also involve the team of presenters …stay tuned!” concluded Guido Monti.

The new playlist

Alongside a mix of national and international hits from the 80s to the present, R101 will offer its listeners regular doses of the pop and disco music of the 70s, as well as plenty of dance and pop rock.

With regard to the hits of the present, R101 will highlight only quality tracks that are destined to become memorable over the years.

R101’s musical offering will “sound different”, thanks to greater variety in the playlist, which will increasingly give a sense of a more emotional station, playing a bigger range of tracks while also constantly remaining in harmony with the state of mind of the audience.

A new Web Radio dedicated to the ’70s

The new musical direction of R101 continues also online, with the addition of a new web radio dedicated to the Sounds of the ’70s: a world of pop and disco featuring the biggest hits from the period, from Donna Summer to the Bee-Gees, and from Gloria Gaynor to Abba.

The new web channel is part of the growth of the R101 site, which has seen a significant increase in its audience and contacts, reaching in a short time a total of more than 200,000 visitors.

Mondadori has accepted the invitation to Italian companies in the paper and printing sector made by Greenpeace to join in the fight against deforestation with a commitment to define a gradual shift to the use of FSC-certified paper (from sustainably and responsibly managed forests) in the production of books. “Forest-friendly” paper will be used for some prestigious and high-quality literary series, such as: Strade Blu and Oscar Spiritualità by Edizioni Mondadori, Einaudi Stile Libero, Wellness by Sperling & Kupfer and, in children’s books, some of the Geronimo Stilton, Scooby-Doo and Flambus Green series published by Piemme.

“I am extremely proud of the commitment that Mondadori made to help build awareness through the Greenpeace campaign,” stated Riccardo Cavallero, general manager of the Mondadori Group’s trade books area. “The reason why Mondadori has decided to accept Greenpeace’s invitation is that it well help us to operate in an increasingly more sustainable and responsible way in the market, and it will allow us also to offer to our readers a concrete opportunity to make a conscious purchasing decision in favour of the environment.”

“Mondadori’s decision,” claimed Chiara Campione, head of the Greenpeace Forest campaign, “is a first and much appreciated step, especially given the quantity of paper consumed by the company. We hope that it will be followed by others, so that in the short term we, as readers, can be sure that we are not helping to destroy a part of a tropical forest every time we buy a book.”