Online shops such as bol.com benefited from the reading hunger that arose among the Dutch during the lockdown. Bookstores, like other non-essential stores, had to close their doors for nearly a third of the past year. Thus book sales moved to the internet.
Abroad, the book market shows a similar development. In Great Britain and Germany, among others, the turnover of book sales rose by a few percent, without physical bookstores improving. In France, the bookshops prospered: the market there benefited from the declaration of the bookshops essential and the culture pass of 300 euros, which minors received from the government.
Two and a half books per Dutch person
In total, 43.1 million books – including e-books, excluding study and scientific books – were sold in the Netherlands last year, almost two and a half books per Dutch person. Knowledge platform KVB Boekwerk calculated this on behalf of the Stichting Collectieve Propaganda of the Dutch Book. In 2012, that number was the last time this high, with a total of 45 million books sold.
The best-selling book of 2021 is The seventh sister by Lucinda Riley. More than 300,000 copies of the last book by the British writer who died in June were sold. The children’s book is in second place The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse by Briton Charlie Mackesy, translated by Arthur Japin, of which 234 thousand were sold. Lale Gül completes the top three with her autobiographical book I’m going to live. With 207 thousand, it is also the best-selling Dutch-language book. Gül won the NS audience award at the end of last year with her debut novel.
The sales and turnover of physical sales by bookshops were 16 and 15 percent respectively lower for the whole of 2021 than in 2019, the last year before the corona crisis. Compared to 2020, physical bookstores also sold less. In the period when book lovers could shop without restrictions, between the end of April and mid-December, sales in the shops boomed. Back then, bookstores sold 6 percent more books than before the corona crisis.
Best books 2021
According to the book editor of de Volkskrant the best book of 2021 is a novel of the old-fashioned kind: everything is made up. In the rest of the top 51 you see the boundaries between genres blurring.
Incidentally, the sale of physical bookstores also decreased in the last few years before the corona crisis broke out. Compared to 2017, sales have decreased by about a quarter. At the same time, e-commerce, as online sales is called in marketing jargon, grew by 67 percent.
“The lockdowns have severely affected the free market of book sales,” says director Caroline Damwijk of Libris en Blz. According to her, the more than two hundred affiliated bookstores have grown considerably online, but ‘you mainly see that pure online players have had the wind in their backs’.
Professionalize webshops
Nevertheless, according to Damwijk, the online sale is not a ‘danger’ for the local bookstore. Online, the Libris and Blz bookstores now have a share of 5 to 6 percent. Damwijk does recognize that you have to invest heavily to play in the digital world. ‘Your webshop must be professional. You are compared to a bol.com or an Amazon.’
At the same time, brick-and-mortar bookstores have found new ways to market their books during the pandemic. Normally, with online orders, books go directly from the Centraal Boekhuis, the book warehouse in the Netherlands, to the customer. Since the pandemic, Libris and Blz bookstores have also been supplying from their own stock. ‘With couriers, for example,’ explains Damwijk. ‘We see that customers appreciate that.’
Readers were less likely to find their way to the public library in the past year. An initial estimate by Stichting Leenrecht, which is charged by the government with the collection of loan fees, shows that members borrowed approximately 38 million paper books and physical audio books in 2021. That number is 10 percent lower than the previous year.
The most borrowed book is for the second year in a row Most people are good by Rutger Bregman. The book has been lent more than 35,000 times. In place two and three are respectively ‘t Hooge Nest by Roxane van Iperen and The evening is inconvenience by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld.
An earlier version of this article also mentioned Amazon as an example of online stores taking advantage of the increased demand for books. However, this is not explicitly apparent from the figures. Therefore this has been removed.