Book reading habits: LBF2009
Publisher’s Weekly has just summarised a panel discussion at this year’s London Book Fair relating to differences between UK and US readers:
In terms of what readers are buying, mystery and romance accounted for much larger shares of fiction purchases in the U.S. in 2008 (a combined 57%) than in Britain (31%), where “general popular and literary fiction” as well as adventure/thrillers were more popular. Gallagher’s conclusion to the findings is that the American market is very much driven by sales of front list and bestseller list titles. In nonfiction, religion is a prominent player in the U.S. market, but much less so in Britain—although Bohme referred to a different sort of religion, one of the “cult of celebrity,” driving nonfiction book sales: one in five nonfiction books purchased in the U.K. are biography, and celebrity bios are especially popular, he noted.
Interestingly, ebook sales, which apparently constitutes 1.5% of the market in the US, isn’t even counted in the UK.
