From The Bookseller:
The British high street saw a 4% rise in book volume purchases through physical stores last year, while online sales flatlined. However, online retailers continued to grow their market share of the print market with a 1% rise to 32% of volume purchases in 2016.
These were the findings of Nielsen’s Books & Consumer annual survey.
. . . .
In terms of volume, online purchases remained the same as last year due to the flatlining in e-book buying, whereas the high street saw a rise of 4%. Both online and store purchases were up in terms of value, with sales through online channels up 5% to £1169m and sales through stores up 7% to £1130m in 2016.
Bohme’s findings also confirmed that purchases of e-books are in decline, with consumers buying 4% fewer in 2016 – a trend which coincides with a slowing in the growth of device ownership and the increasing of e-book prices. In addition, multi-function devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, overtook dedicated e-reading devices as the most commonly used for e-reading, with a 48%-44% split respectively.
. . . .
Jacks Thomas, director of The London Book Fair, added: “Much has been said in recent years about e-reading cannibalising the sales of print books, so it is very interesting to see how this trend has reversed and how print is now very much back on the up.”
Link to the rest at The Bookseller
This is the Nielsen Books & Consumer annual survey, not the Bookscan that tracks ISBNs at point of sale. Doesn’t mean the numbers are accurate (look at recent election and referendum predictions for pollster accuracy!), but I believe it is a genuine attempt to pick a representative sample of UK adults and survey their book buying and reading habits.
I looked for a description of methodology beyond ‘we survey readers’ and found this in the 2015 report:
The Nielsen Books & Consumers™ UK survey monitors the consumer book market in detail, collecting information on consumer book purchasing of both print and e‐books through all sources from 36,000 book buyers aged 13‐84 in the UK.
Nielsen’s Understanding The UK Digital Book Consumer [another part of the 2015 report] is an annual online survey which monitors digital engagement among UK adults including their habits and attitudes and uses a nationally representative sample of 2000 adults.
Nielsen do a similar survey in the US.
At the end of the day, it’s what’s going on in my area of science fiction that I’m most interested in, and it doesn’t say anything that granular. It does tell me that in comparison with a few years back, people are more likely to be reading my books on tablets and phones than on dedicated readers. I believe that. But I knew that already.
Tim,
What would you like to know about science fiction – either the sales, or the book buyers?
I ask because I’m interested in figuring out what authors and other book folk want to know about with regards to data. We do similar surveying in Canada and will be releasing a science fiction subject/genre study in the not too distant future.
Like Nielsen…we track both POS and consumer data…but solely for the Canadian market. However, the behaviour here is similar to other English-speaking territories.
Noah Genner
CEO, BookNet Canada
Must be those Amazon brick ‘n’ mortar stores 😛
I just feel like there’s some data missing there…
Some? Probably half. Maybe more.
Since Nielsen only covers books with an ISBN, they’re WAY off. And they may not even report some of the ones they know about (wrong publishers?)
They are all living in their own dream world.
Yes. It could have been a worthwhile article if they’d not just parroted Nielsen but instead discussed the methodology and critically examined the results. As it is it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.
Actually the Nielsen report is not based on ISBNs, but rather a consumer survey, as pointed out over at The Digital Reader.
http://the-digital-reader.com/2017/03/14/no-nielsen-doesnt-track-books-sold-isbn/
I stand corrected.
I thought it was data based.
My Amazon reports page shows me a ‘This chart shows each format’s copies sold reported by BookScan for the time period selected. BookScan does not report all retail sales.’ entry which correlates with my weekly PAPER sales – I only have an ISBN on the PAPER book.
It STILL misses an enormous amount of things they don’t want to see and simply don’t count.
So, again, publishers push up the price of ebooks relative to print, then celebrate because print sales go up and ebook sales down, even though they make less profit on print books than they do on a ebooks.
Only in WhaleMathWorld…