EXECUTIVE SUMMARY BOOK PUBLISHING AND THE BIG PICTURE The impact of COVID-19 on different industries, markets, and segments of society has varied widely. In broad terms, digital has benefited, while analog has struggled. Many of the larger companies have gained market share from their smaller competitors. The super-rich have massively increased their wealth, while many of the poorest have suffered. Amid the upheaval, book publishers have, on the whole, fared well. The publishing industry, straddling as it does the poles of analog/digital, large/small, and for-profit/not-for-profit, has largely escaped the COVID-inflicted disruptions faced by several other sectors. The most recent data from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), market researcher NPD Group, and Publishers Weekly show solid gains through October across nearly all publishing sectors (K-12 instructional materials being the outlier), after a flat-to-declining performance in 2019. Supply chain issues have resolved themselves, and the shift of publishing staff to work-from-home has been fairly seamless. Looking to 2021, most projections for the U.S. COVID-recovery economy as a whole are positive, with expected growth of 6% or more. Given that publishing sales have increased in the economicallychallenged environment of 2020, the prospects should be encouraging. Still, it remains to be seen whether the reading-favorable environment of stay-at-home living has been just a short-term stimulant or represents a longer-term trend; and whether books can hold their share of consumers’ discretionary time and budgets vs. the rapid growth of streaming media.
THE OUTLOOK FOR RELATED SECTORS The goal of this report is to look beyond publishing, to the surrounding sectors and to the larger economic picture, in order to examine how changes outside of publishing could impact it. Retail. COVID-19 has driven a huge shift in the retail environment, from brick and mortar to online, and from the weaker to the stronger. At the end of the third quarter of 2020, the e-commerce share of retail sales had increased by over a third from the previous year. Several well-established chains have filed for bankruptcy, while Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target reported record sales. Although books themselves have performed well, partly buoyed by the success of Amazon and of non-traditional book retailers, year-to-date bookstore sales were down by almost a third through September. Libraries. The most contentious pre-COVID issue in the library market, a conflict over publishers’ terms for ebook offerings, was superseded in the pandemic by an explosion of patron demand for ebooks. But beyond the ultimate disposition of publisher conditions for library ebook sales, major questions remain for libraries post-vaccine(s). A lingering distaste for handling shared physical objects
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