Van der Velde
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 00:01
The Dutch bought slightly more books in 2022 than in the previous year. Figures from the CPNB Foundation show that 43.2 million books were sold last year, ranging from paper books to e-books. The total book market in 2022 was therefore worth around 664 million euros.
The market for Dutch-language books, on the other hand, has shrunk; Last year, sales of Dutch-language books fell by 3 percent. For Dutch-language fiction, the decrease was even 10 percent.
The fact that more books were sold after all was entirely due to foreign-language books. One in five books sold was in a foreign language, the vast majority of which were in English.
English books popular
According to Zwolle bookseller Caroline Bosch, the English book is especially popular among young people and young adults. They grow up with English, including through social media, so they also want to read in that language. “I only buy English books. I think it sounds better than Dutch,” says a young person in the Bosch store.
Tanja Hendriks of publisher Ambo-Anthos suspects that English-language books will remain popular for a while. English books are also usually cheaper than Dutch books because of the larger print runs.
Catching up with physical stores
The figures from the CPNB Foundation also show that the physical bookshops fell behind the online sales channels in the corona years 2020 and 2021, but caught up in 2022 with the sale of 24.5 million books. That is 16 percent more than in 2021.
Online sales and turnover of books, on the other hand, fell by more than 10 percent. In addition, fewer single e-books were sold in 2022; sales fell by 6 percent to 2.9 million e-books.
Stichting Leenrecht reports that public libraries lent out approximately 51 million paper books and physical audio books last year. That is an increase of 34 percent, after two lean years due to the restrictive corona measures.
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