Page Turner: Printed Book Sales Rising Again in the U.S.

Despite the shift to digital in almost all aspects of media consumption in recent years, a perhaps unlikely renaissance is occurring in the world of books. As figures from Publishers Weekly show, having fallen quite dramatically between 2008 and 2012, good old-fashioned printed book unit sales have been steadily rising in the United States since.

As our infographic shows, this recovery picked up extra pace during the pandemic, too. According to Publishers Weekly, the 2021 increase was led by fiction titles. "The young adult fiction segment had the largest increase, with unit sales jumping 30.7%, while adult fiction sales rose 25.5%. Sales in the juvenile fiction category increased 9.6%".

The only segment to record a decline in unit sales was juvenile non-fiction but, according to the source, this was to be expected, after 2020 and the start of Covid-19 restrictions led many parents to purchase educational books for their children. Nicely indicative of the development of the pandemic in 2021, "the small travel subcategory, which was hammered in 2020, when few people traveled, had the biggest increase last year, with sales up 23%".