Textbooks

Higher Ed Course Material Sales Undergo Dramatic Slide

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/14/20

Sales of textbook materials for college and university courses plummeted by $119 million between June 2019 and July 2020. That's a 22 percent drop, according to the Association of American Publishers. Sales for July 2020 in that segment totaled $425.7 million, compared to 545.1 million in July 2019.

Total sales in the higher education category of publishing totaled $1.377 billion for the seven-month period of January 2020 through July 2020, down from $1.453 billion over the same period last year, a decline of 5.2 percent.

Professional books, which include business, medical, law, technical and scientific subjects, shrank 20.3 percent during July, coming in at $80.2 million. The category was down 0.7 percent for the first seven months of the year, with $337.2 million in revenue.

As a separate category, university presses generated more revenue: $5 million in July 2020 versus $4.2 million in July 2019, an 18.5 percent lift in sales. However, that wasn't enough to make up for an overall decline in business. Sales for university presses totaled $26.7 million between January and July this year, versus $29.3 million in the same period last year.

Overall education revenues for higher ed, K-12, professional books and universities presses were down 18.7 percent year-to-date, totaling $2.84 billion.

The APP generated the statistics from publisher net revenue, including sales to bookstores, wholesalers, direct to consumer, online retailers, etc. The data was drawn from revenue information from 1,360 publishers.