A promised land

Come-back

For­tu­nately, ap­pear­ances de­ceive. Books are mak­ing a come-back. In the United King­dom in 2021, 212 mil­lion books were sold, 5% up on 2020. And 2020 saw a 7% rise in total sales over 2019. 2020 and 2021 were years of the pan­demic, so this has its logic. When forced by plague to stay home, peo­ple had more time to read. Kids off school needed to be ed­u­cated. Sales of cook­books and do-it-your­self books soared. The most ex­cit­ing mo­ment was in June 2020, when book­shops in the UK opened after over two months lock­down. Book sales were 31% up on the pre­vi­ous June.

The most pop­u­lar fic­tion ti­tles were crime, sci-fi and ro­mance, but what is de­fined (loosely) as “lit­er­ary fic­tion” was also ris­ing. Books like Mag­gie O’Far­rell’s out­stand­ing Ham­net, a novel on Shake­speare’s son, en­tered the top 20 ti­tles sold in 2021.

The USA had sim­i­lar fig­ures: 2020 sales were a mas­sive 750 mil­lion books, up by 8.2% from the pre­vi­ous year. 2020’s biggest US seller was Barack Obama’s A Promised Land. Is­sued in No­vem­ber, it sold an amaz­ing 2.68 mil­lion copies in the last eight weeks of the year. I’d often won­dered why pub­lish­ers laid out such large ad­vances for politi­cians’ mem­oirs. Now I know.

Cat­alo­nia

On pre­sent­ing the bal­ance of the year in De­cem­ber 2021, Patrici Tixis, Pres­i­dent of Cat­alo­nia’s Gremi d’Ed­i­tors (Pub­lish­ers As­so­ci­a­tion), was eu­phoric. 2021 had been the best year for sales in ten years. Eu­pho­ria took him over the top: “For the first time, books are com­pet­ing on the sofa with tele­vi­sion and au­dio­vi­sual plat­forms.” All this with­out a proper Sant Jordi. Books, he said, are Cat­alo­nia’s “main in­dus­try”, with 25,000 peo­ple em­ployed and an an­nual turnover of 1,200 mil­lion euros. I love books too, but in his ex­cite­ment Tixis is surely for­get­ting such in­dus­tries as wine, tourism or cars.

The sta­tis­tics are good and re­mark­ably, in Spain, Cat­alo­nia, the USA and Britain, the sales of e-books, de­spite their being much cheaper than print books, have been drop­ping since 2018. In the UK in 2020 e-books were a fifth of the mar­ket. Ac­cord­ing to Tixis, in Cat­alo­nia they rep­re­sent only 7% of the mar­ket. Peo­ple like to fon­dle what they read. Good news for book­shops.