Two-thirds of UK book sales came through online channels in 2020

Online sales channels accounted for more than two-thirds of UK publishing revenue in 2020 (68.6%), amid a widespread shift towards digital, according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Publishing Industry Report, launched at today’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

The report, established in collaboration with the International Publishers Association (IPA), and with input from the Federation of European Publishers (FEP), uses data provided by the national publishing associations of more than 50 countries, although major markets such as China and India are not included.

The 2020 report shows the Covid crisis had a mixed impact on revenues internationally, with year-on-year declines of 31.6% in Turkey, 19.8% in Brazil, 7.3% in Sweden and 5.6% in Colombia, while there were lifts in Japan (10.7%), Italy (8.6%), Norway (4.2%), Finland (3.8%) and New Zealand (2.5%), as well as in the US (up 0.6%) and the UK (up 2%).

Just 12 countries reported revenue data by sales channel, but online sales are said to have generated fully 68.6% of total revenue in the UK in 2020, with the online share of total trade sector revenues standing at 38.7% in Brazil, 38% in Sweden and 37.3% in the US. Year-on-year comparison is only available for a few countries, but the report cites an increase in the share of online sales by 13.4 percentage points for the UK, 6.6 percentage points for the US, and 43 percentage points for Turkey.

Two-thirds of the 27 countries in which 2020’s title output could be compared to 2019’s showed declines in the number of titles published, with Spain seeing the steepest decline, of 12.8%. However all 19 countries which reported by format saw increases in the share of digital editions, with Chile seeing its digital share rise by 21.4 percentage points.

World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) chief economist Carsten Fink said: “The good news for the publishing industry is that it hasn’t had a collapse in demand [as a result of Covid], but there is not a universal direction. In some countries revenue seems to go up, in others it goes down. A big trend is the shift to digital and the rising market share of online sales. For all the countries where we have comparable data for 2019 and 2020, we have seen an increase, and while one could argue that this is part of a larger shift in consumer purchasing habits, given that some of these percentage changes are quite large—for some countries, double digits—I would argue this is a Covid effect and that the pandemic has accelerated a long-term trend.”

The WIPO Publishing Industry Report will be launched by Fink at an event entitled “The impact of Covid-19 on the global publishing industry”, held today (Wednesday 20th) at 10 a.m. UK time (11 a.m. in Frankfurt) in a livestream shown at the fair in the Agora. It will also be simultaneously streamed on buchmesse.de. Participating in a subsequent discussion will be IPA president Bodour Al Qasimi, Nielsen Book m.d. Andre Breedt and John Degen, executive director of the Writers' Union of Canada and chair of the International Authors Forum.