Germany's book trade down 2.1% in 2022, but bricks and mortar triumphs

The German book market ended the year 2022 with sales down 2.1% in value across all major channels, as against 2021’s book sales put at €9.63bn. The writing had been on the wall for some time: after a strong spring, business steadily started going downhill from May.

By the end of November, accumulated sales were lagging 7.4% year on year, but a better than expected December — where sales were marginally up 0.1% — helped the market to significantly reduce the gap. The biggest push came in the last week before Christmas when sales rose 28%. Anecdotal evidence shows that post-Christmas sales were also much stronger than expected.

Early statistics published by the trade paper buchreport and the trade association Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, which both work in conjunction with retail monitor Media Control, show bricks and mortar booksellers as the year’s clear winner. After the restrictions of two Covid years with long periods of state-enforced store closures, physical bookshops closed 2022 on a high: December sales were up 5.6% year on year, and the total increase was 4.8% despite disappointing results in November (-2.5%) and October (-5.7%).

While bricks and mortar booksellers were celebrating, online sellers were baffled by a surprising double-digit sales decline, making e-commerce the year’s biggest loser. Over the 12 months sales dropped 18.5% compared to the boom year of 2021. December was down 11.5%.

Germany was the worst performer among the three German-speaking countries in Europe. According to buchreport, book sales in Austria were up 0.9% for the year and 2.9% in December. In Switzerland, December sales declined 2.6% but the year overall saw small growth of 1.1%.

Börsenverein chairwoman Karin Schmidt-Friderichs called 2022 a "challenging year” for the book market in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. And she warned that the industry is facing “new hurdles”, with bottlenecks in procurement, rising costs of production and energy, a “historic downturn” in consumer spending and reduced footfall in the city centres among them.

Detailed statistics on the year’s performance will not be available until early summer.