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Yes, People Do Buy Books

From the you have never been to my house departmentDespite viral claims, Americans buy over a billion books a year [you bet we do…used books…from bookstores…and we read them too…so there]: “…How many books are sold in the United States? The only tracker we have is BookScan, which logs point of sale—i.e., customer purchases at stores, websites, etc.—for most of the market. BookScan counted 767 million print sales in 2023. BookScan claims to cover 85% of print sales, although many in publishing think it’s much less. It does not capture all store sales, any library sales, most festival and reading sales, etc. (Almost every author will tell you their royalty reports show significantly more sales than BookScan captures. Sometimes by orders of magnitude.) Still, I’ll be very conservative and assume 85% is correct. This means around 900 million print books are sold to customers each year. Add in ebooks and the quickly growing audiobook market, and the total number of books sold is over 1 billion. Again, this is the conservative estimate…”

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