The Associação Portuguesa de Editores e Livreiros, released data from the study conducted by Gfk, an independent entity that audits and counts book sales throughout the year, on the national bookselling market.

This five percent growth in the book market indicates the continuation of the growth trend recorded in 2022 (15 percent) and 2021 (16 eprcent), despite the less pronounced quantity, this is a “clearly positive sign for the sector”, which points to the “resilience” of the market in times of economic downturn.

The president of APEL, Pedro Sobral considers this is still “reasonable growth”, because before the pandemic, for example, in 2013/2014, the sector registered “growth of around one percent, a stable, almost stagnant market, until 2019, the majority of books were bought more as gifts than for reading”.

“After the months of confinement there was a paradigm shift, which was demonstrated in 2021 and 2022, with double-digit growth, maintaining the trend in 2023. This five percent growth indicates that the purchase of books is increasingly more for personal consumption rather than as a gift”, he stated.

Pedro Sobral explained the drop in book purchases from 15 percent to five percent is due to “macro variables”, in 2022, the book market lost around 17 percent, then in 2021, there was an abrupt rise in which “it practically recovered what it had lost in the previous year”; in 2022, the country experienced a “frank period of some economic growth, essentially through the Private Consumption Index, which also poured into books”.

In 2023, macro conditions greatly squeezed family disposable income, particularly due to the "spike in interest rates and inflation”, so a five percent growth is a sign of “some resilience”.

APEL disclosed that in 2023, 13.1 million books were sold in Portugal, with an income of €187.2 million, an increase of seven percent compared to 2022.

The data from Gfk revealed a “finer analysis”, which exclusively takes into account the book market in Portuguese, only general editions and sales by retailers with stores, explained the president of APEL.

As maintained by the data, this continuous growth in the book market is due to the increase of book purchases in the categories with the greatest weight in the market, namely the fiction category, which increased by nine percent compared to 2022, and the children’s fiction category, which also increased by nine percent.

This followed by the non-fiction category, mainly tourism books, with a growth of eight percent, and books in the category of practical life such as leisure and current affairs, with a growth of four percent.

The increase of purchases by younger age groups is also due to sales in comics/manga category, which went from a value of around two percent in 2019 to five percent in 2023.

In children’s books category, there was a 15 percent growth in purchases, which is due to a “notorious trend” of “greater concern among parents, caregivers and educators in purchasing books as an integral part of the process of the growth and education of children.

APEL considers this is the “ideal time to resolve the weaknesses that still prevail in the sector”, either through the book voucher or by “reforming the Lei do Preço Fixo to enhance this preference for bookstores, enabling the survival of the stores across the country, and more bookselling projects capable of alleviating the difficulty in accessing books in many areas of the country”.