The number of new books published in the UK last year was higher than 2007, but remains well below those of five years ago, according to the figures just released from Nielsen Book.
Nielsen Book, the leading supplier of bibliographic information worldwide, announced that the number of new books published in the UK in 2008 is 120,947, an increase of 4.4% on the previous
year but still not reaching the heights of the 2003 figure of 129,762.
The total number of English-language books held on the Nielsen Book database now stands at over 8m globally and 5m for UK & Ireland published titles, this includes in-print, print-on-demand, e-books and out-of-print titles.
Nielsen Book is in a unique position within the UK book industry, running four key elements of the
supply chain: the ISBN Agency, book data collection and aggregation, transaction services and
sales data collection from 8,500 retailers in the UK. The BookScan sales monitoring service is the
world’s largest continuous retail monitoring service in the world and now covers nine countries
including the UK, Ireland, US and Australia.
In the UK Nielsen BookScan reported 2008 volume sales were down by -0.4% to 236.8m units sold
and value sales declined by -1.5% taking the TCM market (Total Consumer Market) in 2008 to £1.77bn. However, taking out Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sales in 2007 (and the 2008 Paperback sales) would mean that 2008 saw both volume and value growth. Volume sales would have been up by +1.3% and value sales up by +0.5%.