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The books market in China as measured by data company OpenBook rose by 10.8% year-on-year in the first half of 2019, according to statistics presented at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) this week. That's only slightly below the 11.3% rise the market showed overall in 2018.
Within the total, children's books were once again the star performer, making up 27.4% of the overall market, a market share rise of 1.2%. According to the categorisations used by OpenBook, social sciences was the next biggest category, at 25.6% of the market, followed by textbooks, literature and fiction, and science & technology.
Children's books sold most strongly in online stores, where they represented 28.9% of overall sales, while textbooks were the strongest in physical stores (31.5% of in-store sales).
Overall the market continued to shift strongly to online, with online stores seeing a 24.2% rise year-on-year while physical bookshop sales dropped 11.7% on the first half of 2018.
The top performing titles by non-Chinese authors for the first half of 2019 were, in fiction, Khaled Hosseini's perenially popular The Kite Runner and Keigo Higashino's Miracles of the Namiya General Store; in non-fiction, Positive Discipline by Jane Nelsen and Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari; and in children's, Charlotte's Web by E B White and Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney.
Within children's books written by non-Chinese authors, picture books made up the highest percentage (at 34.4%, up 2.4% on the first-half of 2018), followed by encyclopaedias, YA fiction, English learning, puzzle and game titles, and pre-school books.
OpenBook estimates the total market from sales data acquired from over 6,000 online and off-line bookstores across China, calculating totals on list price, without taking into account discounting.