Fewer sales, more income and bookstores as the spearhead of a publishing sector that faces 2023 with optimistic figures, until consolidating internet sales at around 29%. Ignacio López, from the analysis firm GfK-NIQ, explained this yesterday in the presentation held at the Edita Forum on the publishing market in Spain, a “resilient” sector, as the speaker defined it in front of the audience gathered in the Institute of Continuing Education of the Pompeu Fabra University, which attended a profuse enumeration of figures that break down the state of the sector.
According to the data presented, growth in 2022 was 1%, after growing by 23.5% in 2021 to recover from the pandemic, a figure valued positively by López because it means growing “over growth”, a trend which will remain throughout 2023, in which an increase of 0.9% has been recorded so far, with the forecast to close the year between 1.1% and 2.3%, up to boost the volume of turnover above 1,100 million euros, the highest figure of the last decade thanks to the jump after the pandemic, and consolidate a growth that in previous years was more leisurely.
This “frankly positive” assessment has its reverse when you look at the detail and see that sales fell by 2.4% last year, a decline balanced by the increase in the price of books by 3, 4% The average price of books is around 15 euros, 50 cents above their value in 2019.
This increase is even greater in the case of novelties, which reach 16.4 euros in the first half of this year, which represents a rise of 7% for the more than 14,000 published references, a slightly lower figure to those published in the same period of 2022, which closed with 26,000 new titles on the shelves. In this section, the 10% drop in comic book sales in the first semester should be highlighted. These figures do not mean that the genre “is not in good health”, but after years of constant growth thanks to manga, there has been a halt. “It is true that the evolution of manga was incredibly positive and now it seems that it has had a small stagnation”, López pointed out to explain this fall, and he emphasized, on the other hand, that the genres of non-fiction and fiction continue being the predominant ones, given that they cover 62% of the novelties.
If the sector as a whole has grown, so has one of its most fragile and at the same time necessary capillaries, the traditional bookstores. Sales in this type of establishment have grown this year by 2.9%, consolidating a cumulative upward trend of 12.5% ??since 2019, which places them as a “very stimulating channel” within the evolution of the market. “Without a doubt, things are going well, and they are obviously adapting to the times, even new bookshops continue to open, fortunately”, said Ignacio López. These establishments are responsible for 43% of sales, which represents a 3% increase compared to 2021, while department stores and chains continue to dominate sales, with 51% of turnover, and hypermarkets 7% are reserved. As for online sales, it seems to have stabilized at 29% of the total, after reaching peaks of 35% during the pandemic.
By territory, the Community of Madrid is the region with the most sales, with 22.6% of the total, followed by Catalonia, which represents 22.3%, after experiencing a growth of 4% in 2022, while that Madrid fell by 3%. Figures in which Sant Jordi’s Day has a special weight, when sales in Catalonia represent 53.4% ??of the total for all of Spain. In this latest edition, they have reached 1.45 million copies, 11% more than the previous year, with bookstores as the main point of exchange (71% of the total) of copies that in 41 % were in Catalan.
April 23 continues to make a difference in terms of book sales, with very high figures concentrated on this day and throughout the week, the best proof of the good health of the publishing sector.
