Units Up 5% in 2007

The number of book units sold, as measured by Nielsen BookScan, rose 5.0% in 2007, to 692.3 million. (Figures don't include spoken-word audio titles or calendars.) There was little change in the number of outlets reporting to BookScan from 2006 to 2007, making meaningful comparisons between the two years possible.

Unit sales of the top 250 titles jumped 23.7% in 2007, to 82.4 million, and accounted for 11.9% of units sold in the year, compared to 10.1% in 2006. Sales at the top of the list were led by the juvenile category, where sales of the top 50 titles, led by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, rose 102.6%. The weakest performance was in the mass market paperback segment, where units sold fell 24.8%, to 9.4 million. It is estimated that BookScan covers about 70% of the outlets where books are sold, although with sales of mass market titles moving more to nontraditional outlets, its coverage of sales of that format may be below 70%.