On Wednesday, September 10, bookstores participating in the Book Sense marketing program were sent an e-mail requesting a response to ABA's semi-annual sales revenue survey. ABA is encouraging all stores to respond to the survey, whose results provide the association with a picture of how its members are performing and enables ABA to answer questions from the press and other interested parties about the performance of independent bookstores.

All responses are kept confidential.

A response to the survey is requested by September 24.

This is the first of four articles looking at the results of the recently released 2002 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing, conducted by Ipsos BookTrends and published by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG). This week's focus is the adult book market.

More and more gift buyers are avoiding the decision-making process of book purchasing for the more convenient purchase of a bookstore gift card/certificate, according to recent research conducted by Ipsos BookTrends. If the gift certificate/card growth rate continues through 2005, and total consumer dollars continue to be relatively flat, "it is a good assumption that gift certificates/cards could account for 5 percent of consumer dollars or around $700 million," noted Michael Hoynes, ABA marketing officer.

In a month featuring the release of two new blockbusters, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's Living History, and the first pick of Oprah's revived book club -- East of Eden, bookstore sales came in slightly ahead of last year's figure. June is the first month this year to show a gain over 2002.

Retail sales in bookstores in June of $1,178 million were 1.9 percent better than last June’s $1,156 million.

Online retail book sales will nearly double over the next five years, according to "U.S. eCommerce Overview: 2003 to 2008," a report recently released by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research. Overall, the study predicted, e-commerce will experience a 19 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years, from $95.7 billion to just under $230 billion and will account for 10 percent of total U.S. retail sales by 2008.

This month, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (UWW) released a new study, "America's Most Literate Cities," which provides a literacy ranking of America's 64 largest cities. Topping the list was Minneapolis, with Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, and San Francisco rounding out the top five.

Bookstore sales in April were soft, though the decline was not as sharp as it had been in the previous two months. April sales of $984 million were 5.7 percent lower than the $1,043 million realized in April of last year.

Overall retail sales of $308 billion for April 2003 were 3.7 percent ahead of the $297 billion for the previous year.

April is the 15th month in a row in which bookstore sales failed to keep pace with overall retail.

Bookstore sales in March turned sharply downward continuing the decline that began in February. March sales of $929 million were 17 percent lower than the $1,126 million realized in March of last year.

Overall retail sales of $306 billion for March 2003 were 3.4 percent ahead of the $296 billion for the previous year.

March is the 14th month in a row in which bookstore sales failed to keep pace with overall retail.

While the story of last year's adult trade sales does not have a particularly happy ending for the nation's bookstores, the news was not uniformly bad for independents, according to Ipsos BookTrends. In the April/May issue of the Ipsos Ideas' newsletter, Ipsos' Barrie Rappaport wrote that "the U.S. Book market is flat. Annual growth for general trade print books has been barely keeping pace with population growth rates." While growth was somewhat better between 1992 - 1996, she noted that "[it] has trailed off over the past five years."

Bookstore sales turned downward in February after a brief upturn in January. February retail sales for bookstores of $1,069 million were 4.3 percent lower than the $1,117 million generated in February 2002.

Overall retail sales of $271 billion for January 2003 were 3.0 percent ahead of the $263 billion for the previous year. February is the 13th month in a row in which bookstore sales failed to keep pace with overall retail.