The book industry, or should we say the book field, will have shrunk at least 2 per cent by 2024. You just don't read that in the press releases about the industry's annual figures, which the CPNB director ance now tells us to call 'field'. Something to do with flowers.
The ability to present all the news, including the bad, as something beautiful, good and cheerful quite often makes me envious of communications professionals. The method is also quite simple, properly speaking. Often it comes down to omitting certain words, or snowballing the bad news with as many other figures as possible to the point that no one notices.
So on Thursday 23 January, I was at KVB Boekwerk's annual seminar and the CPNB's New Year's reception and it was a celebration of good news.
KVB-BBB
The booksellers' seminar, for instance, made it clear that sustainability was quite a thing, quite on the agenda here and there, but otherwise yielded no more than a certain sense of urgency. Which, incidentally, was also lacking among readers, who were quizzed in a vox pop video. 'Sustainability' plays no role in the offering and buying of books. Things are happening quite a bit, with laminate-free paper - provided it is not too expensive - and catalogues moving to online (finally, after 15 years), but real breakthroughs are not coming. When asked, the panel did want to state that, if something had to happen, it should mainly come 'from collectivity'.
That is another word for: someone else has to start, or else we will be screwed. It's a bit like having the manure problem solved by BBB's fraction. That works too. Someday. Perhaps. As long as someone else starts it.
The Camino
For the really good news we then had to go to the CPNB, which announced its annual figures before the bitterballs. They were pretty good. They really were, when you consider that, for the first time in years, a Dutch book was number 1 on both the list of best-selling books and most-loaned works: The Camino by Anya Niewierra topped the list with 167,000 copies, finally leaving the eternal Seven Sisters behind. (The Camino by Anya Niewierra is the best-selling and most-loaned book of 2024 - CPNB)
Also good were the turnover and sales figures. A little bit more books were sold in 2024 than in 2023 (+1 per cent) and that also resulted in a little bit (1%) more turnover. You can call that positive, and Eveline Aendekerk did so flawlessly, right down to the muttered side note that in recent times inflation has been whooping, reaching 3.3 per cent in 2024.
So that is also the reason why the presentation of the annual figures mentioned 'turnover' and 'sales', but not 'result' or, more simply, 'profit'. Because that has thus declined, as has the income of Dutch authors, as their share in total supply declined again by 16 per cent.
Book week surprise?
We saw all that after a nice panel discussion with a few members of the jury that selected the writer of this year's Book Week gift from 154 entries. We didn't get to see that writer (m/f/x) yet, of course, because a separate press moment was devised for that.
However, Lidewijde Paris did say that a lot of special books had not made it through the selection. One jury member accidentally mentioned a "he" and someone said the Book Week gift "fits into a large body of work." That could mean we get a gift from AFTH.
We are not betting on it yet.
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