This week fellow Substacker Elle Griffin published “No one buys books,” which looks at quotes and stats from the DOJ vs. PRH (Penguin Random House) trial where the government successfully blocked PRH’s $2.2 billion purchase of Simon & Schuster. Griffin’s article has gone viral for its near apocalyptic portrait of publishing. Much of the overall thrust of Griffin’s article is right: Most people don’t buy many books, sales for most books are lower than many think, and big publishing works on a blockbuster model where a few couple hits—plus perennial backlist sellers—comprise the bulk of sales. But I hope Griffin wouldn’t mind my offering a rebuttal of a few points here. As I think a few things are off.

I was alerted to the article by people rebutting it by sharing my 2022 article about the hard-to-believe claim that 50% of books only sell 12 copies. This claim, and similar ones, go viral pretty regularly despite making no sense. In the comments of my 2022 post, Kristen McLean from BookScan attempted to recreate the viral statistic and couldn’t come close even by restricting sales to frontlist print sales in a calendar year. It seems unclear what the 12 copies claim is referencing at all.

While I think Griffin does great work collecting these quotes, I would offer a word of caution. PRH’s legal strategy was to present publishing as an imperiled, dying industry beset on all sides by threats like Amazon. PRH allegedly even paid high fees to have agents and other industry professionals testify on their behalf. I’m not saying any of the quotes are lies. I’m saying the quotes and statistics are fitting a specific narrative in the context of a legal battle.

First though, let’s step back and look at the biggest question. Do people buy books?


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.

Is one billion plus a lot of print books? Depends on your point of view. For comparison’s sake, there were 825 million movie tickets sold in the US and Canada in 2023. So roughly as many books are purchased as movie tickets, two somewhat comparable entertainment options in terms of price. OTOH, that’s new movies in theaters versus all books in publication. Additionally, far more books are published each year than movies, meaning that—as everyone knows—most individual movies are watched far more than individual books are read.

Whether this number is big or small, it’s fairly stable. Print book sales have not been decimated by digital sales/streaming. That’s right, despite the introduction of ebooks, various Netflix for books services, and endless cries about the death of publishing…. overall print sales have held pretty steady. And when we add in ebook sales, that means overall book sales are actually increasing.

Again, keep in mind the top chart is only counting print sales at retailers. It is not including the millions of ebooks and audiobooks sold. It also doesn’t include library sales—which, for certain books, make up a huge percentage of sales. It also doesn’t include used book sales, which is a whole other market.