Saturday 24 January 2015

Real Books survive



Articles are starting to appear saying that readers are remaining loyal to real books. Bookshops in the UK, US and Australia are claiming rising sales figures. Waterstones in the UK claims a 5% rise in December against the previous year. Foyles reported an 8% rise. Barnes & Noble report a 5% rise in shares.

Physical books sold in the US rose  2.4% in 2014. In the UK real book sales fell by 1.3% but that is better than the 6.5% fall in 2013.
Deloitte are said to estimate 80% of book sales will be real books in 2015.

Ebook sales have slowed and fewer e-readers were bought at Christmas.
 
The growth area is young adult fiction. Teenagers prefer real books, maybe because they can read and share with friends. Also, many don't have credit cards for online buying.
The increase in sales of real books may be small, but at least it is travelling in the right direction. E-books seem to have stalled saleswise, though self-publishing is still increasing and that no doubt accounts for Twitter being filled with adverts for books to the point that I'm thinking of hunting for people not involved in writing just to get some sort of decent content.

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