Features

In depth: LibScan charts

11.11.11 | Tom Tivnan

Given the intense budgetary pressures public libraries are under, last week's Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy (CIPFA) figures hardly came as a surprise. CIPFA's annual statistics on the public library service revealed that in the year to 31st March 2011, spending on public libraries decreased by 2.3% to £1.16bn.

Spending on books, in particular, was down across the board. Adult fiction acquisitions were hardest hit, falling 7.4% to 4.58 million books against the previous year, children's fiction fell 7% to 2.92 million and children's non-fiction fell 5% to 659,000. Total book stock held by libraries dropped to 98.3 million from 99.2 million. Library supporters have sounded notes of alarm. Reacting to the figures, campaigner Desmond Clarke told The Bookseller: “These figures are really for the period before the major cuts started. We have a very serious situation. People within the profession are totally demoralised.”
The battle over public libraries looks set to rage for quite some time. While the turf wars over closures and budgets get played out in parliament, at local council meetings and in the courts, librarians charged with purchasing books need to be sharper than ever. It is therefore a good time to examine the latest Nielsen LibScan data for the current trends and bestsellers.

Feast of fiction
Nielsen set up LibScan, its library issues monitoring service in 2009. It now collects data from 1,415 library branches in 58 local authorities, representing about a third of all UK public libraries.

On a top-line basis, the year-to-date figures for LibScan's most recent reporting date (from 1st January to 8th October), we can see just how dominant both Adult Fiction and Children's are. Adult Fiction is the largest overall LibScan category, representing 44.1% of all issues—a contrast to Nielsen BookScan's figures, which show that Adult Fiction made up 27.6% of all physical book sales last year. Similarly, Children's made up 18.8% of sales through bookshops in 2010, while the category's share of the library sector thus far in 2011 is a massive 35.4%.

Library goers are less keen on non-fiction than bookshop customers. Non-Fiction: Trade was by far the most popular BookScan category at the end of last year, accounting for 41.8% of sales; thus far in 2011 it is just 17.4% of LibScan issues. Similarly, Non-Fiction: Specialist (essentially the academic and professional market) accounts for a mere 2.6% of LibScan issues, while it made up 11.5% of BookScan sales.

Author, author
Though Children's is the second most popular LibScan genre, children's authors dominate the top of the library author charts. Fourteen of the top 20 spots on this year's LibScan author list are held by the children's sector, including numbers two through five: Daisy Meadows, Jacqueline Wilson, Julia Donaldson and Francesca Simon. Just over 67% of the top 20 LibScan author issues were generated by these 14 authors.

Children's authors may rule the Top 20, but James Patterson sits comfortably at the top, with almost 333,000 issues. In our author chart, we have a column of estimated issues in order to give a sense of the library market as a whole; since LibScan represents about a third of all public libraries, we have multiplied LibScan data by three. Granted, this is a rough estimate, but it should mean that in just nine months, Patterson has generated close to one million issues.  

Whatever the overall estimates, Patterson certainly has an impressive hold on the LibScan data. He has six of the top 20 most issued books in 2011 and 12 of the top 100. He is responsible for a smidgeon over one in every 100 fiction issues this year.
Nora Roberts is the next non-children's author after Patterson in sixth place, but this is with an asterisk. Add her 215,000 issues with her alter ego
J D Robb (who is in 44th place), and she would have 297,824 issues, or good enough for third place.

Roberts/Robb is a good example of what works in libraries: the weight of backlist. While a BookScan bestselling author list can be dominated by writers with just a few books to their name—such as David Nicholls, Kathryn Stockett and Dawn French—in libraries it is the old war horses with shelves' worth of books which churn out the issues in libraries. Two authors in the top 50, Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie, have seen more than 1,000 different ISBNs issued this year. Only two authors in the Top 50 have notched up fewer than 100 different ISBNs issued—Beast Quest author Adam Blade (84) and saga queen Rosie Harris (82). Only one author in the most issued Top 100 has less than 50 ISBNs charting through LibScan: Stieg Larsson, with 36 different formats and editions of his Millennium trilogy.

It's criminal
Lee Child, 16th overall in our author chart, has two of the three most issued books thus far this year: Worth Dying For and 61 Hours (both Transworld) are at positions one and three, with 16,240 and 12,723 issues respectively. Crime rules the books charts, with 36 of the top 50 LibScan titles in Nielsen's Crime, Thriller & Adventure category. In fact, crime accounts for 18% of all library issues (the category represents about 8% of all bookshop sales), and 36% of all fiction issues.

It is worth noting that runaway bestsellers do not necessarily translate to an equivalent library success—particularly if the books are available for sale in mass 
market paperback. Nicholls' One Day (Hodder), for example, has sold over 861,000 copies this year through BookScan, but has had a decent, though not hugely spectacular, success in libraries with 8,816 LibScan issues. Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My 
Dog (Transworld) has sold over 233,000 copies through bookshops in 2011, but it is only in 173rd place on LibScan, with 6,242 issues.  

The top LibScan non-fiction book is Bill Bryson's At Home (Transworld), way down in 257th place (5,449 issues). There are another 65 spaces between Bryson and the next most issued non-fiction title, Paul O'Grady's The Devil Rides Out (Transworld), followed by another huge gap to Tony Blair's A Journey (Hutchinson) in 426th place. Clearly, the public likes to own rather than borrow non-fiction books.  
 

 

Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.thebookseller.com/trackback/72261

Latest Jobs

Project Editor
We have an excellent new role with a...
Available on request
Executive Editor - Children's Books
Do you know what makes a great...
Competitive
Managing Editor
The Pharmaceutical Press are looking...
£35,000 - £40,000 plus benefits
 

TheBookseller