4 March 2025

As we grow the international reach of our Books & Consumers survey, with Australia and New Zealand launched in 2024 and India in 2025, we’ve also reached a milestone in the flagship UK product: in August 2024, we surpassed one million purchases recorded through the survey! That’s based on our current methodology going back to 2012 (the survey itself has been running in various forms since the late 1980s), and that million and a bit breaks down to nearly 820k print, 155k e-book and 31k audiobook purchases, giving us an incredibly robust dataset from which to garner insights as the book industry grows and changes.

Steve Bohme will reveal the 2024 results for the UK at the London Transport Museum on 26 March 2025 (scroll to the end for info on booking tickets), but here we’ll look back at the historical purchases. When weighted to the size of the full book market, those million survey responses represent nearly 4.5bn book purchases in the UK from January 2012 to August 2024, adding up to £30bn spent by consumers across print and digital formats. The month with the highest number of estimated book purchases was December 2016, when 50m books were bought in the UK, but December 2020 saw the highest consumer spending, at £405m.

Of the estimated 4.5bn book purchases since 2012, 40% were adult fiction, with the remaining split evenly across non-fiction and children’s & YA, while print formats have accounted for just over 70%. Crime & thriller has been the most popular genre, making up 14% of overall book purchases reported through the survey and rising to more than a quarter of digital purchases. In fact, there have been more crime & thriller digital purchases since 2012 than non-fiction and children’s digital combined.

In the survey, respondents provide the details for specific books that they’ve bought, which allows us to dig into insights by author and sometimes even title. We have more than 1,000 authors that have a large enough sample size to analyse on their own, and there are 12 names that have garnered more than 5,000 responses since 2012, adding up to 10% of the 1.0m purchases tallied. With fiction taking the largest share of sales, it also has the most authors in this upper segment, with seven sitting primarily in adult fiction. Children’s & YA takes the remaining spots, including the top one: J.K. Rowling has collected the largest number of purchases, at 24k. Below you can see the different format patterns for those 12 authors; the print share ranges from 98% of Julia Donaldson purchases down to 53% of Lee Child, who has the highest e-book share, while J.R.R. Tolkien has had the most significant audiobook share among these names.

Of course another aspect of consumer data is understanding who is behind the purchases. Women have bought more than half of books in the UK as recorded by the survey, at 59%, followed by a slightly lower share of print books (58%). They’re even more key to the e-book market, accounting for 65%, while audiobooks show a 50/50 split for male vs female buyers back to 2012. By age, 25-34s have bought the highest share of print books (22%) and audiobooks (27%), but 60-84s lead for e-books (26%). Although with data spanning more than a decade, those numbers fluctuate each year, as ever evolving book trends drive different groups in different ways. To hear the latest findings, join us on 26 March for The UK Book Consumer 2024. In person and virtual tickets are available now; please contact infobookresearch@nielseniq.com for more information and to book your place.

And now you know, any time you fill out a survey, all those individual responses certainly add up! Stay tuned for the next million!