06
THE LEAD STORY PA STATISTICS YEARBOOK 2015
13.05.16
www.thebookseller.com
Uplifting: PA Yearbook heralds a return to growth
Publishers’ total sales edged up by 1% in value in 2015 BY BENEDICTE PAGE U
K publishers celebrated a 1% rise in the invoiced value of their annual sales in 2015, to
a total of £4.4bn, with a strong home market compensating for some tough areas in export. The lift, recorded in the Publishers
Association’s PA Statistics Yearbook 2015, comes in welcome contrast to 2014’s flat sales, and the drop (of 2%) suffered in the year before that. The £4.4bn total represents both physical and digital book sales, plus income from journals. Figures for the home market were up a healthy 3% (combined physical and digital book sales), to £1.9bn; compensating for a 3% fall in exports (£1.4bn), with declines in North America (nearly 18%), Australasia (12.6%) and Europe (nearly 5%). Physical book sales saw a marginal
year on year rise overall (+0.4%), with an export decline of just over 3% offset by the strong UK market (+3.4%). But digital revenues were a mixed
bag. There was plenty of growth: the overall figure for digital books and electronic journal subscriptions was very healthy, with a 3% rise year on year, to £1.3bn. Schools showed they were continuing to make a digital shift, with figures up 23% from a small base to £16m. In English-Language Training (ELT), digital book sales were up 35% (to £15m), and in academic and professional books the rise was 4%, to £262m. Meanwhile, audio downloads had another excellent year, up by over a quarter to £12m. However, the invoiced value of
consumer e-books dropped by close to 11% from 2014’s total, to £245m. The Bookseller’s Review of
Lotinga
2015, published in January, showed e-book volume sales for the UK’s “Big Five” publishers dropped by a shallower 2.4% to 47.9 million units (no value figures were available at the time), suggesting either that smaller publishers are bearing the brunt of e-book falls or, more likely, that the sector as a whole is seeing pressure on pricing.
TOO SOON FOR TRENDS PA c.e.o. Stephen Lotinga said the breakdown of consumer physical and e-book consumption showed people were “comfortable with a multiformat approach to reading”, and represented “a settling down rather than a reversal” of digital reading. His members’ observations had been that consumer e-book sales dipped in relation to the popularity of specific genres in 2015, such as print-friendly colouring-in books or the giftable Ladybird titles, he noted. PA president Joanna Prior, m.d. of Penguin General, endorsed the view, saying in her foreword to the yearbook that the print upswing and consumer e-book drop “are too
small . . . for us to make any claims for big shifts in consumer behaviour or make predictions for what lies ahead”. But, she added: “I do think that any suggestion that the physical book is doomed can now definitively be refuted as we trade less neurotically in a more stable, multiformat world.”
ADAPTING WELL Both non-fiction and fiction could claim success stories in 2015. Non- fiction saw its invoiced value rise 8% to £808m (combined physical and digital), the first significant increase for several years. Fiction saw physical sales rise 1%
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40