2024’s Most Borrowed Books — Loan stars

Children’s titles have been flying from library shelves this year, with nine of the top 10 most-loaned authors in UK public libraries (and 19 of the top 25) coming from the sector, according to Nielsen LibScan.

As is the case in bookshops, Julia Donaldson is by far the league leader, with just over a quarter of a million books borrowed through LibScan in 2024, 70,000 more than her nearest competitor. The LibScan charts also demonstrate clear points of difference between libraries and retailers, with some authors’ borrowing figures far outstripping their performance at the tills.

LibScan does not have the near-total coverage of its retailer sister data set, Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, as its current panel is comprised of around 50 local authorities and 1,500 branches, representing just over 40% of the UK’s public libraries. However, that is not far off the sample used by the Public Lending Right, the organisation now overseen by the British Library that calculates loans to distribute payments to authors. This year, PLR has 70 contributing local authorities, or roughly half of British public libraries, and will use a “grossing-up” formula to estimate country-wide loans.

Donaldson, and almost every other author in the top 25, does well, as backlist is the driver in libraries. The positions in the top 25 almost directly correspond to a list of authors if we filtered them by the number of ISBNs that have recorded loans through the LibScan top 5,000 this year: Donaldson is first on 113, Daisy Meadows second (109) and James Patterson third (57).

Children’s titles, therefore, have a massive share of library shelves, at least at the very summit. In the LibScan top 5,000 books for 2024, which accounts for 5.6 million of the 21.4 million LibScan loans, a whopping 62.5% derive from the kids’ sector. Just over a third are Fiction titles—of which a majority (58%) come from the Crime, Thriller & Adventure sub-category—while just 3% of loans are Non-Fiction.   

A prime example of how backlist mostly trumps frontlist in libraries is Richard Osman, whose The Last Devil to Die tops the LibScan book charts; his The Bullet That Missed is fourth, while the remaining two titles of his Thursday Murder Club series are in the top 22. But his relatively small catalogue gets him a total of 37,417 loans, good enough for 43rd spot in the LibScan author league table, two spaces and 1,400 copies behind Jenny Jinks.

Even seasoned booksellers might be forgiven for not knowing Jinks: she is the author of scores of titles in the Maverick Early Readers range, but has sold only 292 copies through the TCM thus far in 2024; Osman, by contrast, has shifted almost 567,000 units. In fairness to Jinks and her Horsham-based publisher Maverick Arts, the series’ model is to concentrate on library supply and direct provision to schools.

In the LibScan top 5,000 books for 2024, a whopping 62.5% derive from the children’s sector

But this does underscore the fact that some authors hugely over-index in libraries compared to bookshops. If we combine LibScan loans and TCM unit sales, eight of the top 25 authors generated more than 70% of their total volume through libraries. The list is led by picture-book writer Peter Bently, whose titles have been borrowed just over 47,000 times compared to selling 7,200 units through the TCM, an 86.7% library share. Bently’s 2020 title, Octopus Shocktopus! (Nosy Crow, illustrated by Steven Lenton) is LibScan’s ninth most-borrowed book of 2024, at just under 5,000 loans, while selling 1,666 copies through BookScan.

The other authors with a 70%-plus library share also come from either the picture book or 6+ space, including Meadows and Adam Blade (both “authors” a collective of ghostwriters), Russell Punter and Lucy Cousins. The perhaps surprising entry to this group is Francesa Simon, though that is largely due to Simon not writing any new Horrid Henry frontlist since 2019. 

Conversely, Fiona Watt is the only member of the top 25 with a single-digit percentage library share, undoubtedly due to a significant portion of her TCM haul coming from unlendable interactive titles: just over half of her 663,000 bookshop sales are sticker books.