But hang on a minute. Anecdotally, that's a pretty awe-inspiring collection of proofs. But the plural of anecdote is not data. What is the data telling us?
According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I'll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years.
But wait, say the gloomy. What about the cash? Haven't publishers been forced by avaricious retail giants into a fearsome downward spiral? Discounting has sharpened, but not as much as you'd think. The standard discount on the recommended retail price of a book in 2001 was already at 17.6%. In 2010 it was 26.7%. We'll return to this later.
Even with this discounting, last year UK consumer publishing drew in sales of £1.7bn, up 36% on 2001. Adult fiction saw an increase of 44%, to £476m; and young adult and children's fiction, realm of all those pesky copiers and pirateers and downloaders, saw sales more than double to £325m.
via www.guardian.co.uk