Less 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%. This was stated yesterday by Ignacio López, from the analysis firm GfK-NIQ, within the presentation held at the Forum Edita regarding the publishing market in Spain, a "resilient" sector, as the speaker defined it before the audience gathered in the Institut d'Educació Continua of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, which has attended a profuse enumeration of figures that reveal the state of the sector.
According to the data presented, growth in 2022 was 1%, after it grew 23.5% in 2021 to recover from the pandemic, a figure valued positively by López because it means growing "on growth", a trend which will be maintained throughout 2023, where a rise of 0.9% has been registered to date, with the forecast that it will close the year between 1.1% and 2.3%, until raising the Billing volume above 1,100 million euros, the highest amount in the last decade thanks to the jump taken after the pandemic, and consolidating growth that in previous years was slower.
This "frankly positive" assessment has its reverse when looking at the detail and verifying that sales fell by 2.4% last year, a setback balanced by the increase in the price of books of 3.4%, whose price average is on the way to 15 euros, 50 cents above the value they had in 2019.
This increase is even greater in the case of novelties, reaching 16.4 euros in the first half of this year, which represents a rise of 7% for the more than 14,000 references published, a figure slightly lower than that published. in the same period of 2022, which closed with 26,000 new titles on the shelves. It is worth noting in this section the 10% drop in comic book sales in the first half of the year. 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 standstill. "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 drop, noting, on the other hand, that the non-fiction and fiction genres continue to be the predominant ones, since they account for 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, such as traditional bookstores, whose sales have grown this year by 2.9%, until consolidating an accumulated upward trend of one year. 12.5% since 2019, which places them as a "very dynamic channel" within the evolution of the market. "Of course, things are being done well, and obviously adapting to the times, fortunately new bookstores are even continuing to open," Ignacio López celebrated. 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 reserve a 7%. In relation to internet sales, it seems to have consolidated at 29% of the total, after reaching peaks of 35% during the pandemic.
Broken down by territory, the Community of Madrid is the region with the most sales, with 22.6%, followed by Catalonia, which represents 22.3% after experiencing a growth of 4% in 2022, while Madrid fell 3%. Some figures in which the day of Sant Jordi has a special weight, where sales in Catalonia account for 53.4% of the total in 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) for copies that 41% were in Catalan .
The day of April 23 continues to make a difference as far as book sales are concerned, with very high figures concentrated on that day and throughout the week, the best proof of the good health enjoyed by the publishing sector.
