UK publishes more books per capita than any other country, report shows

UK publishers released more than 20 new titles every hour over the course of 2014, meaning that the country published more books per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world.

According to a new report from the International Publishers Association (IPA), UK publishers released 184,000 new and revised titles in 2013. This equates to 2,875 titles per million inhabitants, and places the UK an astonishing 1,000-plus titles ahead of second-placed Taiwan and Slovenia (1,831). Australia is considerably lower, at 1,176, while the US published just 959 titles per million inhabitants.

The data was compiled from a mix of figures provided by national publishers’ associations, national libraries and national ISBN agencies, and excludes self-published titles, said the IPA. The organisation considered 40 countries for its report – those for which it could obtain “a reasonably reliable value for either the total book market or for publishers’ net revenues”. The UK figure is drawn from sales monitor Nielsen Book, which recorded the total number of new and revised titles published in the UK as about 184,000 in 2013, of which 60,000 were digital.

Leading literary agent Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown described the figure as “either a sign of cultural vitality or publishing suicide”. “Of course, it is utter madness to publish so many books when the average person reads between one and five books a year, but would you prefer 184,000 new brands of shoes or pointless luxury items? In fact, don’t answer that,” said Geller.

At independent publisher Canongate, Jamie Byng was also concerned by the statistic. “I think we publish too many books, Canongate included, and I think this impacts negatively on how well we publish books as an industry. It is very easy to acquire a book. Much harder to publish it successfully. Less is so often much much more,” said Byng.

But Roland Philipps, the managing director of John Murray, was positive about the figures. “For the vibrancy of culture, books are essential, and if publishers are taking on more they must believe that voices are deserving to be heard, even if not all those voices make an impact with the consumer,” said Philipps.

Jenn Ashworth, who won a Betty Trask award for her debut novel A Kind of Intimacy, agreed. “More books and more people talking about books is always excellent,” she said. “Maybe us British people should listen a little more than we talk and read more fiction in translation, and it is a shame we have fewer and fewer librarians to help readers navigate their way through all this glorious literary chaos and find hidden gems. But you’re never going to get me to say that people reading and writing and publishing is a bad thing.”

In absolute terms, the UK is the third leading publisher in the world and the highest in Europe, according to the IPA, with its 184,000 titles coming in behind China’s 444,000 – which equates to 325 per million inhabitants – and the US’s 304,912. (In tiny Iceland, which was not included, around 1,000 new titles are published each year in a language spoken by only 320,000 people.) The UK’s Publishers Association pointed out that the report reveals the UK “also enjoys the world’s best global export performance, with export revenues in 2013 exceeding €1.5bn, compared with €1bn for the US and €331m for Spain”.

Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association, described it as a “world-leading performance”, adding that “as well as the advantage of the English language, British creativity, innovation and historic strength in publishing all play their part”.

“British publishing is a central part of the success story of our creative industries and this performance shows that the UK’s legal and commercial environment – notably our copyright laws – continue to be the underpinning to strong economic performance,” said Mollet. Geller agreed: “With €1.5bn in export revenue, I’d like to think it is time to take the publishing industry more seriously as an industry and support its fight against copyright erosion and VAT threats.”