Books -- February 8, 2023

So, we'll see, time will tell:

After soaring 18.9% in the first half of 2021 over the comparable period in 2020, unit sales of print books retreated in the first half of 2022, dropping 6.6% from 2021 levels. According to NPD BookScan, total first-half print sales were 362.6 million, down from 386.6 million a year ago. All the major categories except adult fiction had declines, with the largest drop coming in the industry’s biggest category, adult nonfiction, where print sales fell 10.3%.

Sales at the midpoint of 2022 were still about 15% above the first six months of 2019, the last prepandemic year, which many in the industry are using as a benchmark, in light of the unexpectedly strong subsequent two years of the pandemic. The 6.6% decline is also an improvement over the first quarter, which saw an 8.9% drop in sales compared to last year’s first quarter.

Much has been made of the weakness in frontlist sales again this year, and that was evident in the BookScan data. Frontlist sales were down 11.7% in the first half of 2022, while backlist sales were off a more modest 4.1%, according to BookScan.