Every week, BNC SalesData provides valuable insight into the Canadian book market. Subscribers are telling us that these statistics are increasingly important to inform crucial business decisions and to measure previously elusive return-on-investment figures of specific campaigns.

Returns remain a constant challenge in the Canadian publishing industry as they allow retailers to take risks on books with uncertain demand even as they represent significant costs for publishers. Although each publisher, distributor or retailer certainly has a very clear view of their own returns, there is currently no industry-wide overview on the size, scale or impact of returns on the Canadian book market and so no way to create large-scale, cost-saving initiatives.

On Thursday, June 14, 2007 at the Gladstone Hotel, BookNet Canada is presenting the premiere event in the BookNet Canada Speaker Series 2007. The BNC Speaker Series is a new forum for book industry professionals to share their insight on how emerging technologies are impacting the Canadian book industry.

The book Oprah chooses tomorrow as the Oprah’s Book Club pick for 2007 is almost assured a place in the overall bestseller lists for the year. BookNet Canada data shows that an Oprah’s Book Club book can shoot to, and remain on, the top of the bestseller lists for months after the announcement is made.

In a holiday sales report released to the publishing industry this week, BookNet Canada data shows fiction sales are outstripping all other categories by a wide margin, accounting for about 46% of all book sales (combining juvenile and adult fiction), followed by cooking, which represents 6.45% of sales, based on the three weeks ending December 3.

Leonard Cohen’s much-anticipated Book of Longing, a collection of poems, drawings and epigrams, has topped Canada’s non-fiction best seller list and has outstripped perennial favorite The Prophet as the country’s bestselling book of poetry so far this year, according to data collected by BookNet Canada.

Canadian poets are among the biggest sellers in poetry in Canada, outselling such classics as Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot and the beat poets, BookNet Canada has found. BookNet Canada is the not-for-profit agency that gathers sales and supply chain data for the publishing industry.