Quarantines spurred boom in US book sales

For book lovers, a quarantine has proven to be the perfect time to read more.

Annie Chen, who has been working from her home in Houston since mid-March 2020, said she considers herself a moderate reader and usually read around 10 books a year.

When a quarantine first started last March, she just started on her second book of the year, Where the Crawdads Sing. But by the end of 2020, she said she had read close to 30 books.

People like Chen have ushered in a boom in the US publishing industry during the pandemic. In 2020, combined print book and e-book sales was the highest recorded in a single year since it started to track sales in 2004, according to NPD BookScan.

Book sales dipped when lockdowns first started because bookstores were closed. The New York Times reported last year that book sales dropped as much as 8.4 percent in March 2020. However, sales picked up and continued to grow since April, as more people turned to purchasing books online.

In 2020, combined print book and e-book sales reached 942 million units at outlets that report to NPD BookScan, a 9 percent increase over 2019.

Kristen McLean, executive director of NPD Books, said the gain was due to a combination of strong sales of both print and digital books.

The 2020 print sales rose 8.2 percent over 2019, the largest annual increase since 2005. Printed books sold 751 million units, the highest since 2009 when e-books started to become popular.

Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House, which published both Michelle and Barack Obama's books, said in an online discussion with the Atlantic Council in early March that one reason book publishing is doing so well is digital fatigue.

"People are in front of screens all the time," he said. "They like printed books."

The 2020 e-book unit sales increased by 12.6 percent over 2019 with 191 million units sold. The American Publishers Association reported that audiobooks finished 2020 with a 16.5 percent increase in sales over 2019.

Chen said at the beginning of the quarantine she put Where the Crawdads Sing aside for a while and spent a lot of time reading about this novel coronavirus.

Two to three weeks into quarantine, Chen resumed reading the book — which ranked as one of the most popular fiction books for 2020 and has garnered more than 126,000 reviews on Amazon — and finished it in "no time".

"Then I started to buy more Kindle books as well as printed books one after another as I have never done before," Chen said. "Before I knew it, I had read 28 books when 2021 was around the corner."

Her readings ranged widely and split about evenly between fiction and non-fiction. "I read fictions for fun and non-fictions for knowledge. I feel I have learned knowledge on various topics during the pandemic year more than in any other year," she said.

Chen said that her biggest knowledge gain was from the non-fiction book Breath by James Nestor, one of the bestsellers.

"I learned something new about the relationship between health and how one breathes. I adopted some breathing practices after reading the book and found it beneficial," she said.

The extra time enabled Chen to finish the voluminous War and Peace by Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

"I had been reading War and Peace on and off for a couple of years but couldn't finish it. Finally, I managed to finish it last summer because I had a lot of time," Chen said.

According to McLean, backlist titles — books that have been published for more than six months — accounted for 67 percent of all print units sold in 2020, up from 63 percent the year before. She pointed out that the increased popularity of online shopping was a major reason in the growth of backlist titles because it is easier to find them than to discover new books online.

Book sales in 2020 came in waves, according to McLean. A big jump in young adult fiction happened in spring when schools were in lockdown, followed by adult fiction jumping in summer.

When the Black Lives Matter movement started in early summer, books about racism helped drive book sales. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo sold 867,000 copies, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You by Jason Reynolds sold more than 317,000 copies, according to Publisher Weekly.

Political books sold very well in 2020 also with No. 1 title going to Barack Obama's A Promised Land followed by Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump, an American psychologist, businesswoman and author who is a niece of former president Donald Trump. Her book is critical of Trump and the Trump family.

With few people traveling because of COVID-19, the travel book subcategory experienced a major drop with sales plunging 40 percent in 2020 over 2019.