So one of my wonkier habits is scrolling through the lengthy SEC filings of major public companies in the book industry, exacerbated by recent annual reports from Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-a-Million. (The detailed filings often share interesting tidbits we don’t get to in the basic earnings releases and ensuing conference calls.) Among the things we’ve learned in the past couple of weeks: Borders sold just over $2 billion worth of books last, out of total revenue of $3.242 billion, or a little under 62 percent of sales. Books-a-Million, on the other hand, says that 83 percent of their […]
Industry Statistics
UK Hardcovers Fall Hard, But US Market Shows Resilience
The Bookseller reports on Nielsen BookScan UK data that shows “a slump across hardcover sales,” as unit sales for the top 5,000 hardcovers fell 14.3 percent for the first quarter of 2009. And the top 400 hardcover fiction title sales fell 17.2 percent in units in that period. In the US, however, a big rise in juvenile hardcovers helped the total market for hardcovers rise by almost 3 percent in the first thirteen weeks. Despite dire selected reports, for the outlets covered in the US by Nielsen BookScan, total unit sales for the first quarter declined only 2.1 percent, at […]
PM Reports Record Traffic In Q1
We’ve been busy reporting everyone else’s quarterly numbers, so we thought we would share a few of our own. Most notably, Publishers Marketplace has been hitting all-time high traffic numbers for the entire quarter. For March our true page views (leaving out hundreds of thousands of views from search engines, spiders, etc.) were over 1.2 million–with both page views and unique visitors up 32.5 percent over a year ago. And traffic was building throughout the quarter; up 12 percent in January, and 16 percent in February, and 20 percent overall for the quarter. We think a lot of it is […]
Sales Fall at Waterstone's
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 […]
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 […]