INSIGHT
‘‘ Nielsen Print books reign supreme
Ebooks gained and then lost the advantage in the commercial book market. However, the movements could signal digital opportunities for public libraries as economic conditions worsen.
T
HE UK print book market trends over the past 20 years show a myriad of changes driven by an even larger
myriad of reasons, recessions, retail changes, transitions to digital formats, shifting consumer appetites and of course, most recently, a global pandemic which spawned all the above.
Back in 2007 the market was riding high with 237.5 million print books sold, still the highest on record (coincidently the year the final Harry Potter title, the Deathly Hallows was released, which helped). In 2008- 2009 there was a UK recession but we saw less than half a percentage drop in book sales measured at this time, the market appeared resilient. But the decrease continued, particularly in 2011 versus 2010 and 2013 versus 2012 and particularly in fiction which hit double digit declines in both periods. The reason? The growth in consumers switching from print to ebooks. The (book-laden) tables turned again in 2015 as the print market started to grow once more and although there have been a few ups and downs, the general trend is positive, indicating that although non-print formats exist and are (as we’ll see below) flourishing in some cases, consumers are still buying print books in vast numbers.
Lockdown impact
The Nielsen BookData Books & Consumer data measures the behaviour of book consumers by month through self-reporting of purchases. The size of the book market across the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 saw changes in purchasing by format. The first
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lockdown in March 2020 led to changes in the relation between ebook and print book purchasing in April. Print books fell from a 67 per cent share to 55 per cent while ebooks leapt from 27 per cent to 37 per cent in a single month. Audiobooks also grew from five per cent to eight per cent. Of course, it was not just consumer tastes that framed the situation with even the UK’s largest online retailer de-prioritising the sale of any books except education in lieu of selling more urgent healthcare and household items (
https://bit.ly/3SeOsaD). As the year progressed the print proportion recovered, but the digital sales remained elevated until August 2020 when it returned to pre-lockdown levels, while print continued to climb as readers turned to print formats in a difficult year.
As we entered 2021 in a state of lockdown, we saw increased numbers of digital books being purchased once again, but this time there was no associated drop in print book volumes and by then retailers, especially physical, had upped their game in an incredible way and found ways to get their books to local buyers by hook or by crook (or by bike). As the year progressed, the ebook share in particular continued to fall with a low of 4.9 million ebooks sold in May 2021. Had the consumer fallen out of love with this digital format? As we look to data from quarter one of 2022 we continue to see sales of ebooks drop. Is this a trend that will continue or will this digital format recover? A question to ask is are consumers simply not wishing to pay for ebooks anymore, which could mean that for the libraries digital loans are protected. When we look at the bestselling
A question to ask is are consumers simply not wishing to pay for ebooks anymore, which could mean that for the libraries digital loans are protected?
Hazel Kenyon is Director of Book Research at Nielsen BookData.
titles in the first quarter of 2022 in the Nielsen BookData Pubtrack Digital data (a panel comprised of ten publishers including Penguin Random House, Faber and Simon & Schuster) we continue to see the same categories leading the way with Crime, Thriller and Adventure titles comprising most of the top 10 with only The Four Winds and Girl A sitting in other categories. The trend across the last four years for quarter one shows that Crime, Thriller and Adventure, General and Literary, Romance and Sagas continue to hold the top three slots in fiction, so the genre mix remains while ebook volumes overall drop. We shall just have to wait and see what the rest of the year brings, with an upcoming recession it’s likely that consumers will be tightening their belts – maybe driving digital readers to libraries. IP
September 2022
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