Blog post by Deborah De Angelis
On 15 October, 2025, Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) through the efforts of its national coordinator for Italy, Deborah De Angelis, together with Open Education Italia, the Information Policy Group of the Italian Library Association (AIB), and Wikimedia Italia, submitted a joint response to the Italian Competition Authority’s (AGCM) Preliminary Report of the fact-finding investigation on school publishing markets (AGCM’s English executive summary). This report stems from a sector inquiry launched by the authority in September 2024.
This important investigation addresses longstanding concerns in the school textbook market, dysfunctions that directly affect families, students, schools, and the public’s access to knowledge. Our submission highlights structural problems and proposes a vision for a more open, fair, and sustainable educational publishing landscape.
Why This Matters
The school textbook market in Italy suffers from structural asymmetries:
- Teachers select the books.
- Families pay for them.
- Students use them.
This separation weakens market accountability and leads to problems such as limited competition, high prices, and a lack of innovation. The AGCM observes how this system mimics the logic of medicines being prescribed, where those who select the product to be acquired (doctors/teachers) are distinct from those who actually pay for it (patients/families). Similarly, publishers face little to no direct market pressure from the end-consumer.
Key Issues Identified
Some of the critical concerns we raised include:
- Market concentration limits diversity and the uptake of Open Educational Resources (OER).
- Proprietary platforms restrict how digital textbooks can be accessed, used, or shared.
- Unfair licensing practices prevent libraries and schools from negotiating reasonable terms for digital materials.
- Digital Rights Management (DRM) is used in ways that control access and limit user rights.
- Schools and libraries often pay excessively high prices for digital editions, sometimes 10x the print version.
- Promotional practices targeting teachers can create dependencies on specific publishers and platforms, reducing educational autonomy.
Our Recommendations
Our submission does not just highlight the problems at stake, but offers concrete, actionable solutions to remedy the situation. Some of the key recommendations include:
- Greater transparency in how textbooks are adopted and promoted.
- Limits on minor “new editions” that block the resale of old textbooks without real updates.
- Support for independent publishers and digital alternatives through public incentives.
- Use of open standards and interoperable formats for digital educational materials.
- Fair digital rights for users, including the right to annotate, print, and use materials offline.
- A national strategy for open educational resources (OER), aligned with UNESCO’s 2019 Recommendation and 2024 guidelines.
- Ongoing monitoring to assess the real-world impact of any reforms.
- Collaboration with the Ministry of Education, schools, libraries, and civil society stakeholders.
- Mandatory interoperability and price transparency, in line with the Digital Markets Act and Italian digital governance law
A Call for Systemic Change
We believe the AGCM’s investigation represents a turning point. It’s time to rethink educational publishing in Italy, not just to lower prices, but to guarantee that access to knowledge is a right, not a privilege.
The digital transition must not reduce user freedoms, nor deepen existing inequalities. Instead, it should foster innovation, educational freedom, and equal access to high-quality learning resources for all.
A more competitive, diverse, and transparent publishing ecosystem, supported by open standards and open content, is not only possible, it is necessary.
17 October 2025
