Print book sales declined 6.41% in the US in 2022
Print books remain mainstream even though we have had e-books for years. However, its sales haven’t been consistent, as the segment has faced several ups and downs. The most significant disruption, perhaps, has been during the pandemic when the sale of e-books peaked as people were forced to remain indoors. Booklovers resorted to buying e-books instead, which led to digital outselling print by a significant margin. However, print books came back soon after that once the pandemic eased. Let’s see how print books fared over the years.
789 million e-books were sold in the US 2022, which marks a 6.41 percent decline from the 843 million books sold in 2021. A year before that, in 2020, we saw 751 million print books getting sold, which again marks an 8.21 percent increase over the 694 million books sold in 2019.
Cut back to 2004 when 648 million prints were sold, which is 22 percent less than the number of books sold last year, which marks a modest improvement at best. The sales statistics reveal it has been 2021 when a record 843 million books were sold. Overall, sales were the highest in the 2020 and 2021 decades when 751 and 843 million copies found buyers in the US, respectively.
As for the genre that turned out to be the most favoured, adult nonfiction sold more than 289 million copies in 2022; this made for 37.8 percent of all books sold last year. Also, young adult fiction was the fastest-growing segment, witnessing 46.86 percent sales growth in the previous five years. Further, fiction became the second highest-selling category of books, with 189 million copies sold last year. That accounted for 24.7 percent of all print book sales last year.
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