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| The top title in the U.K. for the first six months of 2021. | |
Noting that even though 2021 has seen a third national lockdown, three-and-a-half months of closed bookshops and 10 weeks of missing Nielsen BookScan sales data, the U.K. print market has held steady, the Bookseller reported.
Since March 14, when Nielsen began reporting sales numbers again, until July 3, 54.4 million books were sold for £456 million (about $634 million), an increase of 8% in both units and value against 2019. Both adult fiction and children's books categories registered double-digit growth compared to the same period two years ago, with adult fiction gaining 15% in both units and value, while children's jumped 13% in units and 12% in value. Trade nonfiction was the only category to drop in volume compared to 2019 (down 2%, though up 2% in value).
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Booksellers at Hong Kong's annual book fair "are offering a reduced selection of books deemed politically sensitive, as they try to avoid violating a sweeping national security law imposed on the city last year," the Guardian reported.
"Every vendor will read through the books that they are bringing to the book fair to see if there is any content that might cause trouble," said Jimmy Pang, president of the Subculture publishing house. "We don't want to get into trouble that will affect the operation of the book fair, so we self-censor a lot this time. We read through every single book and every single word before we bring it here."
Benjamin Chau, deputy executive director of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, which organizes the fair, had said that books written by pro-democracy authors could still be sold as long as they didn't break the law.
Raymond Yeung, a spokesman for publisher Hillway Culture Company, said: "When we publish a book, we put a lot of effort into ensuring the content is legal. That's why we don't think there's a big problem and would still bring them. We hope this will be an encouragement to our fellow publishers, to show that there's still some people publishing books like this."
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"We're so very pleased to finally show you what we've been working on for so long!" British bookseller Olivia Rosenthall, owner of Maldon Books, said in introducing the Book Hut, a versatile pop-up bookshop that was funded by a Booksellers Association grant, "and comes 18 months after the indie bookshop in Maldon High Street jointly won the National Book Tokens Newcomer of the Year award," the Bookseller reported.
Rosenthall noted on Facebook: "Early this year, when we had to close our doors once again in the third national lockdown, we were so unsure of how things would be for us. Despite the support our customers gave us, like many new businesses on the High street, we just didn't know what the future held for our little bookshop.... The restrictions have made it very difficult to do all the things that we wanted to do, and being a small premises, we weren't sure of what might be possible for us outside of lockdown. So in January we decided to put our heads together, and we came up with The Book Hut!" --Robert Gray