Looking for a quick roundup of our most recent research? Look no further. In this podcast episode we’ll share a list of quick takeaways from our most recent studies including our Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2021, The Canadian Book Market 2021, and the Canadian Book Consumer Study 2021.

(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)

Want to make sure you never miss an episode of the podcast? You can subscribe for free on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, TuneIn, or SoundCloud.

Transcript

Aline Zara: Hello BookNet Canada podcast listeners. This is Aline Zara, BookNet Canada’s Research Coordinator, and I’ll be your host again for today’s podcast.

In this episode, I’ll be giving you a rundown of all our recent research on the Canadian book industry, Canadian book buyers, and Canadian readers, with the hope that this research will help get you up to speed and give you the tools you need to navigate the current market.

All the information I’ll be sharing with you today comes from three of our most recent studies – the Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2021, the Canadian Book Consumer Study 2021, and the Canadian Book Market 2021. I’ll also link each of these studies in the show notes for you to read more about later.

So, what’s new?

Let’s start with our most recent study, the Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2021. This free report looks at how Canadians are spending their leisure time and the behaviour of Canadian readers, specifically, in 2021.

Using data from BookNet Canada's survey of 1,282 adult, English-speaking Canadians, it asks in-depth questions about Canadians’ leisure activities, with a particular focus on how readers and non-readers spend their free time, how readers discover and acquire books, the readership of books across formats, popular Fiction and Non-Fiction genres, and more.

Here are some of the key data points from this study:

Reading and listening to books ranked eighth in the list of the top leisure activities Canadians do every week. At the top of this list are watching videos/TV/movies, cooking, and listening to music.
Almost all of the readers we surveyed (94%) said that they read at least one print book in 2021, nearly two-thirds (64%) said they read at least one ebook, and just about half of them listened to an audiobook (45%).
When it comes to reading frequency, 42% of Canadian readers said they read at least once a day, 22% once a week, 14% once a month, and 22% less than once a month.
The most popular reading-related activity that Canadian readers do is searching for other books by a specific author, done by 38% of Canadian readers
In terms of book acquisition, 56% of respondents chose to buy print books over borrowing them. But for ebooks and audiobooks, borrowing was more popular – 49% of ebook users chose to buy while 51% chose to borrow. For audiobooks, 48% of audiobook listeners chose to buy with 52% choosing to borrow. Worth mentioning here that when we talk about borrowing in this study, it means that a book can be from the library, another person, or accessed for free from a website.

And here’s the best part, if you want to learn even more about how Canadians they spend their free time, you can get a free copy of the Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2021 from our website, where you’ll find the study available as both an accessible PDF and EPUB.

Next up is the Canadian Book Consumer Study 2021. This report compiles the results from our quarterly survey of Canadians about their book buying and book borrowing behaviour in 2021. These results are from surveys about January, March, June, and September 2021, with responses from 10,218 adult, English-speaking Canadians.

In this report you’ll find data on the most popular formats and subjects; insights on why and how Canadians acquire books; the reasons why Canadians decide to buy, or borrow specific books; and data comparing and contrasting buyers and borrowers. Let’s go through some of the highlights:

We learned that 31% of Canadian book buyers search for books by Canadian authors or illustrators, 25% search for books about Canada or regions within Canada, 22% search for books about a group or culture written by people from that group or culture, and 12% search for books that are partly or fully written in another language.
We also asked about the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on book buying. In 2021, 47% of buyers agreed that COVID-19 impacted their book buying. Though that’s down from 2020, when 62% agreed their book buying was impacted by COVID-19 with another 31% saying their book buying was somewhat impacted.
Most of the purchases made by the Canadian book consumers we surveyed were reported as Fiction titles (62%) rather than Non-Fiction titles (38%).
When asked how they bought books in 2021, 58% of buyers said they bought via a website online, 31% in a shop in person, and 7% on a reading device through an app.
In 2021, 22% of the Canadian book buyers we surveyed also borrowed books. These so-called buyer-borrowers checked out an average of 4.9 books per month in 2021 — 3.2 print books, 1.2 ebooks, and 0.5 audiobooks. And why did buyer-borrowers borrow books instead of buy them? Almost half said it was to save money (44%).

If you want to learn more about how and why Canadians acquire books, portions of this study are being shared on our blog or for the full picture, you can download a copy of the study for free from our website, which you can also download as either an EPUB or PDF.

Last but not least, we have our most popular study, The Canadian Book Market 2021. This report is a comprehensive guide to the Canadian market with in-depth category data. It's an indispensable tool for publishers, booksellers, librarians, authors, and anyone interested or involved in the Canadian book industry.

While this is a paid study, there is some data we’d like to share here today — and don’t forget that if you’re a SalesData subscriber you can get a copy of the report at a discounted rate.

Here are highlights:

In 2021, we tracked sales for 857,454 unique ISBNs, which translated to 52,827,913 physical books sold at a total value of $1,122,912,117.
Combined, the sales of Juvenile and Young Adult subjects accounted for the majority of the market share at 41.3%. In second place, Non-Fiction made up 32.7%, and Fiction occupied the third place at 24.9% of the marketshare.
The top two Juvenile & Young Adult titles were Dog Man: Mothering Heights by Dav Pilkey and They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera.
The top two Non-fiction titles in 2021 were Atomic Habits by James Clear and Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown.
The top two Fiction titles were The Midnight Library: A Novel by Matt Haig and State of Terror: A Novel by Louise Penny 🍁 and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
21 Things You May Not Know about the Indian Act by Bob Joseph 🍁 was the top selling title for Canadian-owned publishers in 2021.
State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny 🍁 was the top selling title by a Canadian contributor.

Interested in learning more? Head to our website and purchase a copy of the report for either yourself or your organisation.

If you follow the work BookNet does for research, you probably know that the insights we share go beyond our well-known studies – we also offer plenty of original research into the Canadian book industry on our blog.

Take for example our mini blog series about book to screen adaptations. In this series, we looked at the impact book to film and book to TV adaptations have on Canadian sales and library circulation.

Another ongoing series is called Subject spotlight, where we share data on the Canadian sales and library performance of a specific BISAC subject — our most recent instalment is all about Comics & Graphics Novels.

And there’s so much more to explore on our blog, covering puzzle sales, backlist titles, bestselling books, and even books that turned 20 in 2022. I’ll link everything I’ve mentioned in the show notes for you to dig deep into the data yourself!

And that’s a wrap on all our recent research.

Before we go, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada staff, board, partners, and our makeshift podcast studio, operate upon the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat Indigenous peoples, the original nations of this land. We endorse the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and support an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry. And we hope that our work, including this podcast, helps to create an environment that supports that shift. We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.

Podcast: BookNet research roundup: What you need to know

Further reading/listening

Transcript

Listen to our latest podcast episode