Print Units Jump at the End of June (publishersweekly.com)

Year-end book sales across Europe were slammed by December lockdowns after Covid-19 cases surged across the continent. Still, preliminary results in three major markets show declines for the full year were modest. In Germany, Europe’s single largest book market, sales were up 25% in the first two weeks of December over 2019, but they plummeted when a new lockdown was imposed on December 16. Overall sales for the year were down 2.3% compared with 2019, according to BUCH, a German book publishing trade group. Bookstores saw sales drop 8.7% for the year, but gains by online booksellers and platforms offset that decline. “It is true that books played an important role for people during the crisis,” said Karin Schmidt-Friderichs, head of the BDB, in a press release. “There was great enthusiasm for reading and demand for books was high for much of the year. But the shutdown in December thwarted the industry’s plans. The renewed store closings in the middle of the Christmas business stopped the race to catch up from lost sales due to the shutdown in spring.”

Costco Wholesale Corporation reported net sales of $17.60 billion for the retail month of July, the four weeks ended July 30, 2023, an increase of 4.5 percent from $16.85 billion last year. For the forty-eight weeks ended July 30, 2023, the Company reported net sales of $214.53 billion, an increase of 4.6 percent from $205.19 billion during the similar period last year.

As has been well documented, the pandemic had many unexpected consequences over the past few years, not the least of which was a boom in trade book sales in both 2020 and 2021. But while the trade segment fared well in 2020, the other major publishing segments did not, and total industry sales had only a 0.2% gain that year over 2019. In 2021, trade sales jumped again, but so did sales in the other segments, resulting in a 12.3% increase in total sales, to $29.33 billion, according to the Association of American Publishers’ final statistics for the year. The final figure marks a major improvement over numbers from the previous four years, when sales ranged between $25 billion and $26 billion. In 2021, sales in all segments except professional books topped their 2019 numbers, which have become a measuring stick many companies use given the volatility of the past two years.