Sales for the five-week holiday period fell 2 percent on a same-store basis and 0.9 percent overall–but extend the period to 10 weeks, and the comps were down 4 percent as overall sales fell 3.2 percent. (The company did not report actual revenue numbers.) Waterstone’s does disclose to the Bookseller that they sold almost 30,000 Sony Readers in the UK since the device went on sale there in September.Release Also in the UK, Bloomsbury issued a nonspecific trading update that says activity “was in line with management’s expectations” and they expect to have cash at the end of the fiscal […]
Industry Statistics
Outgoing NEA Chairman "Proves" He Helped Raise Reading
It’s practically poetic. As Dana Gioia prepares to leave his post as chairman of the NEA, a new report called Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy finds that “for the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature.” In talking to the NYT Gioia “attributed the increase in literary reading to community-based programs like the [NEA’s own] Big Read,” among others. The survey says “the overall rate at which adults read literature (novels and short stories, plays, or poems) rose by seven percent” with “the biggest increase (nine percent) in literary […]
2008 Sales: Meyer the New Rowling
Stephenie Meyer sold over 15 million books in the US in 2008, and that’s just in outlets tracked by Nielsen Bookscan, where various editions of her books claimed 9 of the top 50 spots for the year. That total sale is millions of copies more than Rowling’s sales from books in to top last year, when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows tracked 7,740,000 units, and two other titles on the list gave her sales of 8.6 million copies. (NB, that doesn’t include other backlist editions that did not sell enough to make the top 50.) Meyer occupies 6 of […]
The Most Reviewed Books and Imprints of 2008
It was a year of enormous upheaval in the world of newspaper book reviewing, and yet in many respects everything stayed exactly the same. As monitored by our Book Review Index, tracking full-length reviews in the nation’s most widely circulated newspapers, total reviews declined approximately 7.5 percent during the year, with 7,855 reviews tabulated in all. With the same astonishing regularity that we have statistically demonstrated in the past, book editors across the country worked very hard to come to the same conclusions as always. One out of every twelve full-length reviews (or 8.5 percent) went to books by Knopf. […]
UK Sales Finish 2008 Down Slightly
According to Nielsen Bookscan, unit book sales in the UK for 2008 were down by just 0.4 percent, while revenue declined 1.6 percent to 1.773 billion pounds. Revenue was up 3.7 percent for the first half of the year, but declined 5 percent during the second half.
Beedle Sales
According to a press release today, JK Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard sold 2.6 million copies worldwide in its first week on sale, generating £4.2 million (approximately $6.5 million) in proceeds for the Children’s High Level Group charity.