In this podcast episode we share some high-level data for what was going on with the print book market in Canada last year and share some highlights from the BookNet research and education channels.

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Transcript

Ainsley Sparkes: Welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I’m this month’s host, Ainsley Sparkes, Marketing & Communications Manager at BookNet. We’re one month in to 2024 but that doesn’t mean we’re done with 2023 yet. In this episode we share some high-level data for what was going on with the print book market in Canada last year and share some highlights from the BookNet research and education channels.

Let’s look back at 2023 as a whole, what was going on with the print book market in Canada? We pulled the numbers from our sales tracking service, BNC SalesData which represents 85% of book sales for English-language print trade books in Canada and we found that in 2023 Canadians bought 48.8 million books. And while that sounds like a lot — it's more than one book per person as Statistics Canada tells me that the Canadian population is over just 40 million people as of October 1, 2023 — the number of print books sold in 2023 continues the downward trend we’ve seen since 2020.

But let’s jump ahead to a bit of sneak peek of our Canadian Leisure & Reading data. We’ll release the full study later this spring, but you’re hearing it here first! So even though the sales of print books is trending down, the percentage of Canadians reading books has been holding steady, hovering around the 80% mark since 2016 — plus or minus around two percentage points. And in 2023, exactly 80% of Canadians reported having read a book in the past year.

When we look at the formats these 80% of Canadians are reading, we see that print is down here too, from 84% in 2022 to 82% in 2023, but that ebooks and audiobooks are up — 69% of readers read an ebook in 2023, up from 67% the year before, and 54% of readers listened to an audiobook, up from 51% in 2022.

So it’s possible some of the loss in sales of print books has shifted to ebook or audiobook format. Or possibly inflation has been making Canadians less likely to spend and maybe they’ve turned to libraries for their reading needs? We have yet to analyze the entire Leisure & Reading survey data, but we’ll have a clearer picture when we release the full (free!) report. (Shameless plug here: Want to know when it’s out? Sign up for our weekly eNews newsletter and you’ll be the first to know.)

If you want to hear more about what’s happened in the Canadian book market in 2023 and where things might be headed in 2024, we have some upcoming free webinars you might be interested in. One is going to be presented by our knowledgeable SalesData and LibraryData team called Trending now: Book subjects on the move in the Canadian market – all about which BISAC subjects are seeing big gains in the Canadian market. And our annual can’t-miss Book Industry state of the nation update from BookNet CEO, Noah Genner will be happening in April. There’s always a ton of insight into what’s happening in the Canadian book market in that presentation. You can see the show notes for how to register for both of those sessions.

So back to what happened in 2023 — which books were big?

We pulled the bestselling print books in Canada again using SalesData, our sales tracking service for the Canadian English-language trade book market.

The bestselling overall Fiction title was It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover.
The bestselling Canadian Fiction title was Meet Me at the Lake by Carley Fortune🍁.
The bestselling overall Non-Fiction title was Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.
The bestselling Canadian Non-Fiction title was a cookbook, Fraiche Food, Fuller Hearts by Jillian Harris🍁 and Tori Wesszer🍁.
The bestselling overall Juvenile & YA title was Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas under the Sea by Dav Pilkey.
The bestselling Canadian Juvenile & YA title was Love You Forever by Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw 🍁.

As for the most circulated books in 2023, we gathered our data using LibraryData, the national library collection and circulation analysis tool. We added a number of new libraries to the reporting panel this year. If you’re a library looking to participate, please contact us and we can start working with you!

The top-circulating overall Fiction title was It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover.
The top-circulating Canadian Fiction title was The Maid by Nita Prose 🍁.
The top-circulating overall Non-Fiction title was Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.
The top-circulating Canadian Non-Fiction title was The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté 🍁 and Daniel Maté 🍁.
The top-circulated overall Juvenile & YA series was the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney.
The top-circulated Canadian Juvenile & YA collection was the Guinness World Records collection.

What else was BookNet up to in 2023? We put out lots of research and professional development webinars. But I’ll just share a couple here.

Research first. Our most recent free research study is Tapping into Ebooks: Ebook use in Canada 2022 which gives you everything you need to know about ebook use in Canada. It reveals the buying, borrowing, and reading habits of Canadian ebook consumers and tracks the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ebook use, by comparing data from 2022 with past years.

We also released a study earlier this year, exclusive to SalesData subscribers called Winning Kidlit: The Impact of Children’s Book Awards 2022. Using data from 2020 to 2022, this report offers insight into the sales and library circulation of winning and shortlisted print titles from 15 national and international children’s literary awards.

In terms of our education efforts for the Canadian publishing industry, in 2023 we revamped our Tech Forum website. As some of you may know, starting in 2020 we moved our Tech Forum conference online and we continue to offer free webinars monthly from September to June and our new website makes it so easy to find all of our upcoming sessions as well as the entire content library from all the way back to 2009. There’s something for everyone. In 2023 alone we ran webinars about the future of the book supply chain, tips for writing accessible alternative text, content marketing hacks for publishers, how to support retailers with good metadata, findings from the Association of Canadian Publisher’s Canadian Book Publishing Diversity Baseline Survey, and so much more. We hope you’ll go check it out!

We’re always putting out new blog posts or professional development webinars. If you want to know what’s going on with books and readers in Canada, we have you covered. And if you have burning questions and can’t find the answer, email us at research@booknetcanada.ca! If you have ideas for Tech Forum webinars, either as a speaker or just as an attendee who wants to learn more about the subject, let us know. We want to hear it all!

So thanks for joining me for this episode. Before I go, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada’s operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations (which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie, and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan, and Windsor. We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose land you are listening from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.