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Data collected by international book trade publications shows that nearly all territories saw declining sales across 2013, with only Germany showing signs of growth.
Information submitted by German trade magazine buchreport shows that the book trade in the country saw a 0.1% rise in revenue across 2013, with a 0.6% increase in December. Guidebook sales were particularly strong, achieving growth of 6%. However, in terms of volume sales, even Germany saw a decline, with a fall of 1.3%, a figure only offset by an increased average book price (up 1.4%).
The only other country to escape a decline was Sweden, where trade magazine Svensk Bokhandel has estimated that 2013 trade remained level, using figures collected from January to August 2013. Sales through bricks and mortar bookshops were up 4%, and through wholesalers up 7%. However sales to department stores and book clubs declined 18%. As autumn sales were good in Sweden, with bestsellers including Jonas Jonasson and Leif GW Persson, total year statistics could improve, the magazine said. Shops in the country, including the largest chain, Akademibokhandeln, reported solid Christmas trading, with sales matching the levels seen in 2012. The steady figures could be attributed to the lack of migration from print to digital, with the e-book market in Sweden only representing around 1% of the total market, with growth still slow.
The hardest hit country to supply information was Spain, where DosDoce reports an estimated 15 to 20% decline in print book market, with sales over Christmas in 2013 down 8% on 2012. Paperback sales performed particularly badly, plummeting 40% on the year before. DosDoce suggested a number of reasons for the state of the market, suggesting that the financial crisis has affected consumer spending, as well as citing the impact of a lack of governmental spending on titles for libraries, and the ongoing effects of the shift to digital and piracy. It estimated that e-books now account for 10% - 15% of all bestseller sales, and around 5% - 7% of the market overall. Publishers in Spain are increasingly looking to the Latin America and the Spanish language market in the USA for growth areas, DosDoce said.
France and Italy also saw a decline in sales. Informazioni Editoriali in Italy used data collected from 1,600 bookshops to judge a volume decline of 3.6% against 2012, and a value decline of 5.3%. December 2013 saw a small volume growth of 0.8%, but value dropped 3.2%. The average book price also dropped, from €13.46 to €13.13. In France, Livres Hebdo saw the market shrink by 1%. E-books in the country make up around 3% of total sales, but up to 15% of genre fiction sales. Livres Hebdo also reported that bricks and mortar stores, including independents, had a solid year, though the collapse of chains Virgin Megastore and Chapitre affected the overall market.
The UK and the US both saw the market decline in 2013, with the UK recording the lowest sales figures for 11 years. £1.416bn was spent on books in the UK in 2013, 6.5% down on 2012 while in terms of volume, 189.3m units were sold, a fall of 9% on 2012, though part of the drop can be attributed to the impact of EL James in 2012. As The Bookseller has reported, e-books make up around 24% of the market in terms of volume, but only 11.5% in terms of value – and the rate of growth has slowed considerably. In the US, Publishers Weekly reports sales of print books fell by 2.5%, with 501.6m units sold. E-books appear to have eaten away at certain print areas, with adult fiction print sales falling by 11.2%, and mass market paperback sales down by 9.1%.
In Brazil, PublishNews was unable to collate full 2013 data, but the information for 2012, revealed in July, showed a nominal growth in revenue of 3.54% to US$2.115bn. However, when accounting for inflation, this equated to a drop of 2.54%, attributed mainly to a fall in government sales. E-books were estimated to have made up around 2.5% of publishers' revenue.
The most popular books in Brazil were all by foreign authors, with Dan Brown's Inferno topping the bestsellers list. EL James' three Fifty Shade books were also in the top 10, and three of John Green's books. The Fifty Shades titles and Inferno also appeared in France's top 10, though local book Asterix chez les Pictes claimed the top spot. Inferno was the second biggest seller in the US behind Jeff Kinney's latest Wimpy Kid novel, Hard Luck, which sold 1.8m copies in hardback. Inferno was also the bestselling fiction book in the UK, taking £6.4m through the tills, but it was beaten by Alex Ferguson's My Autobiography, which sold £10.2m through bookshops.
In China, local titles dominated, with three Tiny Times books - by YA author and popstar Guo Jimgming - topping the physical bookshop charts. Bookdao in China showed a decline of bookshop sales of 1.39%, though sales of print books online rose 20%. E-book sales grew 50%, but were still less than 5% of the whole 2013 market, with two main players, China Mobile and Amazon's Kindle, competing for readers.