What is the future of reading (book sales dissected)

by: Asa Montreaux 

Is the book industry doomed? Many actually predict that the opposite will happen. Wordsrated predicts that book sales will increase to 82.7 billion. However that number, when considering it is a summarized estimate — which includes print books, books, and audiobooks — that is relatively in line with book sales from the last five years (from 2025).

Other sources, including Statista, predict that book sales numbers will increase significantly by 2027, or ten years from 2017, with some predictions being even quite wildly optimistic. However, the truth is that we do not know. That being said, there is actually a relative stability in these numbers that, while indicating the book industry is increasingly becoming one that is secondary, it is by no mean falling apart, or disappearing.

In fact, from 2017 until now, the largest decrease in revenue in the book market was just 6.62 billion, which was a year over year decrease of just 9.124 percent. The difference between the highest and lowest value year was just 13.24 percent.

To give you an idea what the numbers of revenue tend to be, the mean value from 2017-to 2023 was 68.72 billion. These numbers all represented traditional book sales. When factoring in ebook and audiobook sales, you can see that sales are slightly higher, with a median value of 83.56 billion. Here, we do see an increasing, though not blossoming growth in sales.

So what had happened to create the large year-over-year differential in the data set? There is a simple two-word answer: the pandemic. This resulted in a substantial loss in revenue. If you don’t know much about economics, that was the case with virtually every single sector of the world economy. Similar drops could be seen in almost every category. The phenomenon had occurred that sales of food and essentials skyrocketed, as people prepared for disasters.

Certainly, other categories were more shaken, and in fact online e-book sales still increased by 110 million. Many researchers actually feel that the pandemic actually created a large need for goods like books from the online sector. In fact, there is some evidence of that effect having had staying power, as the audiobook industry has become substantial since the pandemic, and seems poised to become very important to overall book sales.

With reference to US book data, we do see a decrease in book sales when we stretch father back in time. While it is not diminishing at an extremely alarming rate, revenue has dropped steadily in the last 22 years even despite inflation.

Sales Histogram

However, these sales drops have been offset by online book sales. As physical book sales decline, ebook and audiobook sales increase. It seems to be the case that the number of sales of books will actually decrease over the coming years, on a global scale. Actually, sales are virtually disappearing in many countries, and the sales of books are becoming dependent on sales from just five major countries — the U.S., China, Japan, Germany, and India. 

Those countries are predicted to account for 68% of book sales in 2027. This change is amplified by the fact sales are growing quickly in these countries, especially in the U.S., Germany, and India.

Another major change is that actual shift to online sales. As of 2020, 71.2 percent of book sales in the U.S. actually occurred online! The majority of book sales actually occur online every single year, and we’ll continue to from now on. 

As I previously mentioned, the pandemic spurned an increase in book sales online, with countries deeming book stores to be non-essential businesses, that were as a result, either closed or restricted by reduced occupancy rules. Sales of books in the U.S. online sector increased by 24%. This trend continues — book sales are shifting online more and more, and each year a larger percentage are bought online, and over time  a larger percentage of online-only formats (books and digital audiobooks) are chosen.

To pause for a second, does it matter? Books are an important way to consume information, as well as experience stories, which are important for our development of skills such as empathy, emotional understanding, and making inferences. The shift to online sales, seems to actually accommodate the continued learning experience of everyone, though without them leaving their home. The shift to online sales is thought to have a lot to do with a turn away from in-person stores, as well as the general convenience of buying things from home. Given a book is generally more about the content, as opposed to, for example, furniture, many people actually worry about the disappearance of book stores, as their display of books facilitates the discovery of new books, and promotes a love of reading.

Nonetheless, fiction readership right now is actually trending higher. 52.9% of books sold in 2022 in the United States were fiction books. This amounted to 404 million print books, while 360 million were nonfiction books.

In the adult sector, books for informational purposes, or nonfiction books are still the most predominate for sales. The number of non fiction books sold in 2018 accounted for 43% percent of books sold, whereas it accounted for 37.8 percent in 2022.

Surprisingly, YA and children books have actually increased in popularity, and in sales. YA novels have actually generated 34% more revenue. While fiction books are becoming more popular, it does seem to be the case that books are still more popular overall for learning purposes, rather than purely for entertainment. It is the case that textbooks account for a meaningful portion of the sales market, and thus the demand for book sales is not one that is optional, and it does need to continue to have several sources available for consumers.

Most textbooks are bought off Amazon, if they are not bought through a school bookstore. As online sales increase, Amazon actually takes on a larger share of overall online sales as well. Amazon book sales account for 30 percent of the market, and many critics predict this number will increase to 70% in just three years time.

It does seem to be the case that book sales will change significantly. I hope to see physical book stores continue to be around. Online sales have the potential to grow meaningfully, and not be part of a diminishing trend. I think it is possible that sales of books will cross 100 billion by about 2030. There are estimates that are much higher than this, but this actually seems to be a little like wishful thinking, as the popular opinion is that books are on the downfall, and if you ask people if they had been to a bookstore lately, or if they had bought books in any format, they tend to say yes less and less. Though, occasionally, someone has bought a number of books, maybe one a month, or perhaps all of their textbooks, from Amazon, or from BarnesandNoble.com, and the frequency of that occurrence might increase.

...how I planned some of this article(with Bubble):