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German book market ends 2024 on positive note despite pressure on industry
The German book market finished 2024 on a positive note with sales marginally up year-on-year.
According to preliminary figures published by the trade association Börsenverein in conjunction with Media Control, sales grew 0.8% across the major sales channels. These are defined by the trade association as brick-and-mortar bookstores, e-commerce (including Amazon), bookstores in railway stations and airports as well as department stores and electrical stores/drugstores.
Despite the overall growth the industry has remained under pressure. Alarm bells are ringing because in line with less shoppers frequenting the high street, the number of books sold decreased by 1.7% in the past 12 months. Only rising prices – by an average of 2.6% in 2024 – salvaged what Börsenverein’s chairwoman Karin Schmidt-Friderichs called “a challenging year for many publishers, booksellers and logistic companies”.
In a statement Schmidt-Friderichs stressed that the industry “continues to feel the general unwillingness of consumers to spend their money” amid economic and political uncertainty, such as Germany facing on short notice a general election on 23rd February. She also pointed out that the “pressure on costs is continuing along rising administrative burden”.
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On a more optimistic note, Schmidt-Friderichs called it a positive signal that the book industry has been at all able to maintain the previous year’s sales level “in an extremely tense situation”. In this context it is also worth mentioning that local booksellers fared a notch better than the industry as a whole with sales up 0.9% year-on-year.
Among book categories, the clear winner in 2024 was non-fiction with growth of 7.7%, due in part to the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s long-awaited biography Freiheit, published simultaneously by Macmillan in the English-language edition as Freedom. Fiction also grew significantly by 4.1%, whereas books for children and young adults ended the year marginally up 0.5%.
According to Börsenverein, the figures provided by Media Control serve as an initial indication of how the book market fared in 2024. Comprehensive economic data will be published during the summer. In 2023 the German book business was worth €9.7bn (up 2.8%), with brick-and-mortar bookstores the largest sales channel (€4.05bn, up 2.6%).
