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It has been a turbulent year thus far for the German book industry with the surprise announcement in January of the merger of leading book chains Thalia and Mayersche and the insolvency of wholesaler/distributor Koch Neff Volckmar (KNV) two months later. Some good news was therefore much needed and has just been delivered on separate fronts.
According to trade magazine Buchreport, and based on data supplied by Media Control, sales for the first five months are up 4.1% year on year. While this figure covers the market overall including bookstores, online shops, travel book shops and department stores, a separate statistic by Media Control further added to the good news: high street booksellers, which have been under pressure for quite some time, reported solid sales growth of 3% for the period. This is all the more remarkable because demand for publishers’ top 100 titles was weaker than expected. In other words consumers have been buying more books across the board, with general non-fiction and how-to titles particular strong, up 13.6% and 7.8% respectively.
Good news has also emerged from the German trade association. At its annual business press conference, Alexander Skipis, c.e.o. of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, announced a turnaround in the steadily declining customer footfall on the shop floor. A total of 29.9 million customers bought at least one book in a brick-and-mortar bookshop last year, compared to 29.6 million a year earlier, leading Skipis to optimistically claim that 2018 marked “a watershed in the German book industry”.
He may have a point, though, because the greatest increases were registered in those age brackets where most buyers have been lost in recent years – among 20 to 29-year-olds the number of book buyers rose 15.2%, while among 30 to 39-year-olds the figure was up 15.8%. Among the reasons for the upturn Skipis cited “an increasing awareness” in the industry for the necessity of new ways of approaching customers. “These include new store concepts, creative event formats, social media initiatives, new storytelling formats and innovative publishing programmes”, he said.
Skipis also showed himself satisfied that overall sales of books and magazines were stable last year at €9.13bn (£8.12bn). High street bookshops remained the largest distribution channel for books, but sales were down 0.7% to €4.27bn (£3.8bn) and a market share of 46.8%. E-commerce grew by 4% to €1.78bn (£1.58bn), with its market share rising to 19.5%.
The Börsenverein’s presentation was a timely boost for the industry a few days before its annual gathering in Berlin on 18th-19th June and shortly after the competition authorities nodded through the merger of Thalia and Mayersche without any conditions, leaving many booksellers highly frustrated because of concerns that the merged bookselling company will have a dominant position in a number of cities.
But the elephant in the room at the Buchtage will undoubtedly be wholesaler KNV. Insolvency procedures officially started in early May and the pressure on administrator Tobias Wahl to find an investor for Germany’s largest wholesaler as a going concern is immense. “We are optimistic that a successful reorganization of the company will help to preserve the German book industry’s strong and exemplary logistics,” says Skipis, knowing full well that anything else would be a major disaster for the market.
While Wahl is hoping to present an investor in July, he has recently introduced a number of measures to smarten KNV up. Among the latest developments are the cancellation of Monday delivery to 160 bookshops; while the textbook business and the truck delivery logistics have been outsourced.