E-book and printed book penetration
According to data from Statista’s Market Insights: Media & Advertising, e-book penetration still trails that of printed books in the vast majority of countries around the world. In the United States for example, 20 percent of the population are estimated to have purchased an e-book last year, compared to 30 percent who bought a printed book. China is the only country of those studied that saw the opposite trend, with only 24 percent of people having bought a printed book in the 12 months prior to the survey, while around 27 percent of people bought an e-book in that time frame.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Despite the shift to digital in almost all aspects of media consumption in recent years, a perhaps unlikely renaissance is occurring in the world of books. As figures from Publishers Weekly show, having fallen quite dramatically between 2008 and 2012, good old-fashioned printed book unit sales have been steadily rising in the United States since.As our infographic shows, this recovery picked up extra pace during the pandemic, too. According to Publishers Weekly, the 2021 increase was led by fiction titles. "The young adult fiction segment had the largest increase, with unit sales jumping 30.7%, while adult fiction sales rose 25.5%. Sales in the juvenile fiction category increased 9.6%".
In the United States, 44 percent of women said reading was one of their main pastimes versus 30 percent of men. When looking at the U.S. adult surveyed population with both genders combined, the share of people selecting reading in response to this question increased with age (30 percent of 18-19 year olds, 32 percent 20-29 year olds, 36 percent 30-39 year olds, 38 percent for 40-49 year olds, 41 percent 50-59 year olds, 44 percent 60-64 year olds).
83 percent of respondents to the poll claimed to have read at least one book in the past year, a percentage similar to previous polls from 2016 and 2005. This indicates that reading, be it on paper or in digital form, is still very much one of the favorite pastimes of U.S. residents. The drop in mean number can be explained by fewer people reading larger amounts of books per year. Still, the percentage in this bracket is pretty sizable: 27 percent of respondents finished or started more than 11 books in 2021, with 6 percent even tackling more than 51 tomes of knowledge and entertainment. When taking demographic indicators into consideration, the past year's numbers have largely been propped up by college graduates and young adults, of which 35 and 31 percent, respectively, read more than 11 books.