Ernest Dempsey — Children’s books in the United Kingdom, on the whole, are selling better than all other books, show the latest sales figures from Nielsen BookScan, as reported on The Bookseller. The figures available for the first half of the year 2011 show that children’s books were the most resistant to drop in sales in the consumer market that went down by 3.5 percent during this period of the year.Looking at the details of the children’s books sales, one finds a rise by 6 percent (worth 2.8 million pounds) in pre-school and picture books along with a rise in both general fiction books (up by 6 percent) and fiction (up by 8 percent) for children in the first 7 months of 2011. The sale of textbooks also went up by 13 percent in contrast to annuals, which went down by a marked 52%, and young adult fiction, which fell by 38 percent. On the whole, book sales in UK have crossed the one-billion-dollar mark, albeit two weeks later than it was crossed in 2010.
For the books whose sales are declining, publishers in UK think the drop in sales can be attributed to the growing preference for e-books over the more traditional print editions. Sales of e-books now make up to 10 percent of the total book sales with most publishers in UK as against the 5 percent of the previous year.
With the better sale figures for children’s titles, publishers think spending on children is becoming a priority in the face of a difficult economic situation. A major contribution of this spirit for boosting reading in children comes from the middle-class of the baby boomer generation that is buying old titles in times when libraries are closing and bookselling on the average is getting harder each passing day. What is not so clear to the publishers is whether children or adults are actually buying the books while most of the authors of children’s books are adults. But the fact that children’s books are doing good satisfies the publishers, and certainly encourages children’s authors, to be hopeful for the trend to grow in the coming days.
Ed Ripley, sales director for Macmillan Children’s UK, believes that as print titles for grownups leave the shelves of booksellers on account of growing preference for e-books in adult population, children’s titles will have greater room available in bookstores. In other words, e-book publishing is a contributing factor in giving children’s books a chance for better sales and greater exposure.
