Physical bookstores are popular again in the Netherlands, after losing out to their online counterparts during the pandemic. As NLTimes reported citing inputs from the CPNB foundation, there has been a 16 percent increase in the sale of books via physical bookstores, something that also led to a 25 percent increase in turnover for the bookstores. While that is a welcome change for sellers of physical bookstores, it’s still a 2 percent decline in sales compared to what it was before the pandemic in 2019. All of this came at the cost of the online sales of books where sales declined by 11 percent given that it is 12 percent fewer books that were sold online last year. Another interesting development that has come to the fore is the sharp increase in demand for audiobooks.
On the whole, 43.2 million books were sold in the Netherlands last year, which however makes for a rather minuscule 0.4 percent increase over the previous year. It is foreign language books that sold the most, with English language books being the most favored among them. One in five books sold last year has been in English or other foreign languages, with Dutch language books witnessing a 3 percent drop in sales. More specifically, fiction books in the Dutch language saw the biggest 10 percent drop in sales last year. In monetary terms, it is 664 million euros worth of books that were sold last year, which is 2.7 more than what it was in 2021.
Interestingly, there has also been a strong demand for e-books and particularly audiobooks via subscription services. As the foundation revealed, there have been 76 percent more e-books and audiobooks that were availed of by the Dutch in 2022. This accounted for 48 percent of the digital content segment in 2022 compared to 34 percent it has been in 2021. Libraries too witnessed a sharp increase in activity with 51 million books and audiobooks borrowed last year. This marked an increase of 34 percent compared to the number of books borrowed in 2021 but is still less compared to the pre-pandemic days. It was about 56 million books that were borrowed in 2019.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.
