A Rocky Start to 2009

While the overall trends in the first quarter were down, it was not all bad news for the publishing industry in the period. Unit sales data from Nielsen BookScan showed total units off by only 1.7% in the first three months of 2009. According to BookScan, which tracks about 75% of sales, the juvenile segment had a strong quarter, with units up nearly 9%. Stephenie Meyer titles continued to sell well in the quarter, with Hachette reporting that more than 18 million copies of Meyer's titles were sold worldwide in the period. Adult nonfiction had a weak quarter, with BookScan reporting an 8.4% drop compared to last year's first quarter, when A New Earth and Three Cups of Tea, among other titles, were selling in big numbers. Adult fiction slipped by less than 1%.

First-quarter financial reports from the major houses showed how uneven the period was. In its first-quarter trading update, Penguin's parent company, Pearson, noted that while fiction and nonfiction were relatively strong, sales were weak in illustrated reference and travel. (There have been reports that Penguin is looking at ways to revamp its DK unit, which has a big presence in those two areas.) Some independent houses have reported that sales of midlist titles have been particularly slow, with customers sticking to familiar authors. The brightest spot continues to be e-books, with the AAP reporting a 131% jump in e-book sales. Bowker's PubTrack Consumer survey of book-buying behavior found that in the first quarter of 2009, e-book purchases represented 2.4% of all book purchases, up from only 0.6% for all of 2008.

While Simon & Schuster, along with HarperCollins, had roughly a 19% decline in first-quarter sales, S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy said she saw some signs of improvement in mid-March. That is echoed by statistics on bookstore sales from the U.S. Census Bureau. Although first-quarter sales fell 4.1%, the 1.3% decline in March was much less severe than the 11.3% plunge in February. The March drop was also the best monthly performance from the bookstore sector since last August, when sales actually rose by a little more than 5%.

Even with indications that the worst could be over, no companies are looking for anything more than modest gains in 2009, with most happy to beat the industry average—whatever that turns out to be. Pearson said it expects the year to be challenging, while even high-flying Hachette said it expects a tougher second half of 2009 when it will face comparisons to the period when the Meyer books began to take off.