In this month’s podcast, we’re sharing some mid-year market data from an excerpt of the Tech Forum presentation, Ready, set, go: Pre-fall sales trends and data-driven insights.
(Scroll down for the transcript.)
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Transcript
Ainsley Sparkes: Hello, welcome to the last podcast episode of 2025. I’m Ainsley Sparkes the Director of Marketing & Communications at BookNet. This month we’re going to share an excerpt from a Tech Forum presentation by BookNet staff earlier this Fall. In the presentation, Ready, set, go: Pre-fall sales trends and data-driven insights, which you can watch in full by finding the link in our show notes, Lily Dwyer, the product manager of BookNet's SalesData & LibraryData shared a general overview of the Canadian book market and the top selling titles in the first half of 2025. As this year is coming to a close, here at BookNet we’re readying our surveys that will collect the consumer data to round out our sales and circulation tracking and we’re getting ready to publish the bestselling and top-circulated books for the whole of 2025 as soon we have all of 2025’s sales and circulation data. Keep an eye on our blog or sign up to our weekly eNews newsletter to know when those are out (links for those in the show notes as well).
And lastly, if you have feedback to share about this podcast, or about any BookNet products or services, we have an annual customer satisfaction survey where we would love to hear your thoughts. It helps us focus our improvements on the things you care about and also helps with our funding as well as future development projects. Please consider taking some time to fill it out — there are also some prizes to be won as further incentive.
Ok, now over to Lily for the look at the book market.
Lily Dwyer: Hello, everyone. We're just going to start off today's presentation with a general overview of how books are performing so far in 2025, both in the retail space as well as in libraries.
So, let's begin by looking at the retail space. Using SalesData, which is our national sales tracking service for the Canadian English language trade book market, we found that print unit sales for the first eight months of 2025 were up this year by 1.71% over the same period in 2024, according to our Comparable Stores panel. So, the graph here shows the monthly change in print unit sales in the Canadian English language trade market from January to August over the last two years using the Comparable Stores panel. You can see from here that January 2025 proved to be a strong start for book sales, and that has helped contribute to this year over year growth that we're seeing despite dips in sales in both June and August. So, it's very exciting to see that growth in sales, and we're hoping to see it continue to grow through the rest of Q3 as well as Q4.
In here you can see how that growth plays out over each top level subject category. So, juvenile sales take up the largest market share across these subjects but are slightly down so far this year at 0.34%. YA has actually increased by 13.58% so far, which is the largest year over year growth that we're seeing across all subject categories. And when looking at juvenile and YA sales together, we can see that book sales in those categories are up 1.46% compared to the same period in 2024. So, together they account for 39% of all book sales in the first eight months of 2025. Then from there, fiction slides in second place with 30% of the market share, and sales are actually down by 1.04% so far. And finally, nonfiction is in a close third place, accounting for 29% of all units sold. Nonfiction has also seen some growth this year, with sales increasing by 6.43%.
So, what books are helping to drive those sales? Well, here you can see which books have sold the most in each of the main subject categories so far in 2025. For fiction, we have Rebecca Yaros's Onyx Storm. For nonfiction, we have The Let Them Theory by Mel and Sawyer Robbins. And then in juvenile books, we have Big Jim Begins from the Dog Man series. And finally in YA, we have Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins.
Now let's look at some library circulation data. So, for context, 84 public library systems across Canada reported their physical book circulation and holdings data to BNC Library Data in the first eight months of 2025. These reporting libraries encompassed over 772 branches and covered approximately 25% of the Canadian population. In the first half of 2025, libraries reported 24.9 million loans and 13.4 million renewals of physical books.
In here you can see those loans broken down by our top-level subjects again. So, juvenile titles accounted for just over 51% of loans so far this year, with fiction titles accounting for 26%, and nonfiction titles accounting for about 20%, and YA titles accounting for 2%. And what's remarkable here is how little the loan share for these top-level subjects has changed between 2024 and 2025. So, while we saw some slight shifts in the market share of these subjects in the retail space, hardly any changes were seen in libraries.
Now, if we want to take a look at the top circulating titles in libraries, we can see that there are some similarities to bookstores but mostly some changes. So, for fiction, we have The Women by Kristin Hannah. For nonfiction, we have the Guinness World Record series. In juvenile books, again, we have the Dog Man series. And in YA, we have the books from the Good Girl's Guide to Murder series.
Many of you are probably wondering how Canadian titles are performing this year, especially in the wake of this year's efforts on behalf of Canadians to support the Buy Canadian movement. And we'll be going further into those details later in this presentation, but here is a glimpse into the top Canadian titles in both the retail and library spaces. So, starting with bookstores, here are some of the top-selling Canadian titles across all subject categories. So, you can see that there is a good mix of nonfiction with Greta Podlesky's Every Salad Ever and Mark Carney's Value(s). We also have everyone's favourite Canadian summer romances from Carley Fortune. We have some juvenile favourites, including Robert Munsch and The Baby-Sitter's Club, and even some classics, as seen with The Handmaid's Tale.
Now, digging into fiction a bit further, our top-selling Canadian fiction titles were heavily dominated by Carley Fortune, Elsie Silver, and Brynne Weaver books. And in nonfiction, we're seeing a lot of Canadian cookbooks, including The Essential Cottage Cookbook by Andrea Buckett and Meals That Heal Inflammation by Julie Daniluk. We also have some new books from 2025, including I Hope You Remember, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and For the Love of a Son, as well as some familiar favourites from Malcolm Gladwell and Gabor Maté. And zeroing in on juvenile, we're seeing more Robert Munsch, Impossible Creatures, The New Girl, The Squad, and T is for Terry.
Now, what about in libraries? So, it's interesting always to see what's trending in libraries versus what's trending in the retail space. And for 2025 so far, the top circulating Canadian titles across all subjects include the popular juvenile series like The Baby-Sitters Club, Scaredy's Nutty Adventures, Paws, and the Adventure Time series. We have Louise Penny's The Grey Wolf, Nita Prose's The Maid and The Mystery Guest, and two titles we saw in our bestselling Canadian list, This Summer Will Be Different and Revenge of the Tipping Point.
Our top circulating fiction titles in 2025 are heavily dominated by authors Louise Penny, Nita Prose, Carley Fortune, and Shari Lapena. And then for Canadian nonfiction, we again have Malcolm Gladwell, Gabor Maté, and Mark Carney titles. But we also have others in there as well, like Ducks by Kate Beaton and Matthew Perry's Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing. And finally, for juvenile top titles, we have more Robert Munsch and other popular children's series such as Sparks!, Witches of Brooklyn, Whatever After, and The Lunch Club.
Ainsley: Thanks for joining us and listening to the BookNet podcast this year. Before I go, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada’s operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations (which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie), and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan, and Windsor. We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose land you are listening from today.
Moreover, BookNet endorses the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. 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.
Mid-year market data from the Tech Forum presentation, Ready, set, go: Pre-fall sales trends and data-driven insights.