Listen to a sneak peek of BookNet Canada’s upcoming research reports, The Canadian Book Market and The Canadian Book Consumer.

(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)

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Ainsley Sparkes: Welcome to this month’s episode of the BookNet Canada Podcast. I’m your host, Ainsley Sparkes, director of marketing & communications at BookNet. And this month, I’m going to share a short research update. We’re deep in the midst of putting together our annual report, The Canadian Book Market 2024 as well as analyzing the results from our consumer surveying and getting ready to write the Canadian Book Consumer 2024, so we thought, why not share a quick sneak peek.

Let’s start with The Canadian Book Market:

In 2024, we tracked sales for just over 850,000 unique ISBNs, which translated to around 47,000,000 physical books sold at a total value of $1.1 billion.

Combined, the sales of Juvenile and Young Adult subjects accounted for the majority of the market share at 35%. In second place, Non-Fiction made up 30%, and Fiction occupied the third place at 29%.

The top Non-Fiction title was Atomic Habits by James Clear
The top Fiction title was The Women by Kristin Hannah
The top Juvenile title was Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder by Dav Pilkey

This is the fifth year in a row that Dav Pilkey is at the top of the Juvenile category, and he is also the author of the overall top-selling title in Canada in 2024 with Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder.

Some other highlights:

The top selling title for Canadian-owned publishers in 2024 was a holocaust remembrance book for young readers called To Hope and Back by Kathy Kacer, published by Second Story Press.
Books by Canadians made up 12% of print book sales in Canada in 2024. And The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny was the top selling title by a Canadian contributor.

We also found some subject trends that we’ll share in the report. Here’s a small look at what was up in 2024 compared to the year before:

Fantasy was the Fiction category with the biggest growth in market share in 2024 at 32%. Followed by Science Fiction which was up 15%.
Are colouring books back? The Crafts & Hobbies and Games BISAC categories were each up 39% both driven by colouring books which were the top-selling books in those categories.

If you’re interested in learning more about trends in subjects, join the Tech Forum webinar, On the rise: Book subjects on the move in the Canadian market, on March 27. Lily Dwyer and Kalpna Patel will dive deep into the data to find out if Romantasy titles are still flying off the shelves at a feverish pace, whether Taylor Swift can sell books as well as she sells concert tickets, and how other sociocultural and demographic shifts are reflected in book-buying behaviour. The link to register for this free webinar is in the show notes.

Now on to our Canadian book consumer surveying. Each year we conduct quarterly surveying of Canadians about their book buying, borrowing, and reading activities.

Of all the Canadians we surveyed in 2024, 49% bought at least one new book and 27% borrowed at least one book from the library.
During a given month in 2024, 79% of Canadian book buyers visited a bookstore online, and 71% visited in person. Roughly the same as last year.
54% of all book purchases made by these Canadian book buyers were online, while 46% were in-person. These numbers continue to trend toward approaching the pre-pandemic 50-50 split of online and in-person purchases.
Similar to past years, the majority of purchases were print books — 49% were paperbacks and 26% were hardcovers.
Book buyers continued to show a strong format preference for print: 70% prefer print books, 17% prefer ebooks; and 8% prefer audiobooks.
53% of Canadian book buyers in 2024 spent between $1 and $49 on books in a given month.
And in terms of value for money, Canadian book buyers still see books as a good value: 47% of Canadians who bought new books rated their value for money as excellent, while 38% rated it as good.
Of the Canadians who borrowed books in 2024, 44% visited the library online at least once in the given month and 37% of book borrowers visited the library in-person at least once.

The full (and free) Canadian Book Consumer study will be out later this spring and will share much more about how Canadians become aware of the books they purchase or borrow, how they discover and select books, and their acquisition behaviours. This year we’ve also added a question to see whether the Government of Canada's GST/HST relief for physical books impacted the decision to purchase.

Thanks for joining us this month, and keep an eye out for the rest of this upcoming research. You can sign up to the monthly research newsletter to be notified when it’s released. There’s a link in the show notes.

Before I go, I’d like 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 Canada 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 thanks to you for listening.