Clipped wings leave book lovers free to soar
For book lovers, the waves of coronavirus lockdowns over the past year that turned people into homebodies have given them the perfect opportunity to indulge even more.
Annie Chen, who lives in Houston, Texas, and has been working from home since March last year, used to read around 10 books a year.
When the first movement restrictions began to be imposed, she had just started on her second book of the year, Where the Crawdads Sing. But by the end of 2020, she said she had read nearly 30 books.
People like Chen have propelled the US publishing industry to a boom during the pandemic. According to NPD BookScan, combined print book and e-book sales were the highest since the company started tracking sales in 2004.
Book sales dipped when the restrictions first started due to the closure of bookstores. According to The New York Times, book sales in the US dropped as much as 8.4 percent in March 2020. However, sales picked up and have continued to grow since April, as more people turned to online purchases.
In 2020, combined print book and e-book sales reached 942 million units at outlets that report to NPD BookScan, a 9 percent increase over 2019.
All formats gaining
Kristen McLean, executive director of NPD Books, said the gain was due to a combination of strong sales of both print and digital books.
Sales of print books rose 8.2 percent from the level in 2019, the largest annual increase since 2005. Some 751 million print books were sold, the most since 2009 when e-books started to become popular.
Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House, said in an online discussion with the Atlantic Council in March that one reason book publishing is doing so well is digital fatigue.
“People are in front of screens all the time,” he said. “They like printed books.”
E-book sales in 2020 increased by 12.6 percent from 2019, with 191 million items sold. The American Publishers Association reported that audiobooks finished 2020 with a 16.5 percent increase in sales over 2019.
Chen said that at the beginning of the first lockdown she put aside Where the Crawdads Sing for a while and spent a lot of time reading about the novel coronavirus.
Two to three weeks into the lockdown, Chen went back to the book and finished it “in no time”.
Her readings range widely and are split about evenly between fiction and nonfiction. “I read fiction for fun and nonfiction for knowledge. I feel I have learned knowledge on various topics during the pandemic year more than in any other year,” she said.
Book sales in 2020 came in waves, according to McLean. A big jump in young adult fiction happened in spring when schools were in lockdown, followed by gains in adult fiction in the summer.
When the Black Lives Matter movement started early in the summer, books about racism helped drive book sales. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About