Nielsen Reports that Print Book Sales Are on the Upswing

March 22, 2017

Nielsen released 2016 figures that indicate that print book sales are up in Ireland, the UK, and the US, but down in Australia, Italy, South Africa, and Spain, the Guardian reports.

It’s unclear whether the increase of print book sales evidences the declining popularity of ebook sales; more likely, write Marianna Spring and Cath Levett in the Guardian, the UK and the US experienced an uptick in print book sales due to recent political turbulence.

But Maria Sciullo, writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, tells another story: that these figures don’t tell the whole story about the sales of ebooks. According to a data analyst who cofounded AuthorEarnings.com, Amazon has the largest market share of ebook sales, given that 82% of all ebooks purchased in the US in 2016 were Amazon Kindle titles.

Yet “reports on the ebook market tend to ignore Kindle Unlimited,” writes Brady Dale for the Observer, since industry watchers might contend that a Kindle Unlimited download doesn’t translate as a “sale.”

In any case, last week, the NPD Bookscan’s survey indicated that unit sales of print books were 5% higher during the week that ended March 12, 2017 than during that same week in 2016, according to Publishers Weekly’s weekly “scorecard.” Within that category, sales of adult fiction also increased by 10%; adult nonfiction by 6%; juvenile nonfiction by 3%; and juvenile nonfiction by 2%.

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Derek Walcott, 1930–2017
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