German book trade's Christmas saved by last-minute high street surge

Germany’s book market narrowly avoided another major disappointment when a last-minute surge in the high street before Christmas pushed sales marginally ahead of 2017. 

According to trade paper Buchreport which uses data from Media Control, December was up 0.5% after a slow start with the first three weeks of the holiday season down year-on-year by 1.1%. The late surge also helped the year as a whole to just squeak into growth by 0.1%.

While the above figures cover the market overall including bookstores, online shops, travel book shops and department stores, a separate statistic by Media Control about the performance of high street booksellers and book chains specifically paints a slightly bleaker picture; in value the market declined in December by 0.8% and 0.6% for the year.

This was within expectations, but what has alarm bells ringing among German high street booksellers large and small is the steep downward curve of volume sales with  -2.7% and -2.3% respectively. A rise of 1.9% in the average selling price for December and 1.7% for the year was not enough to compensate for the underlying problem of less traffic in the high street.

The modest gain overall was driven by adult nonfiction. Growth of 10.5% was attributed in huge parts to political books mainly of US origins throughout the year and from November on fired by the massive interest in Michelle Obama’s runaway bestseller Becoming. The only other segment that posted gains in the year was children’s books, up 4%, while fiction as the largest trade segment was down 0.9%.