Good e-Reader

Here is the Kobo ebook report for 2019

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Kobo is the largest audiobook and ebook company in Canada and they also have their entire range of e-readers available online and in bookstores such as Chapters Indigo. The company has just issued their new book report for 2019 and they found that Kobo users in Canada spent over 3200 hours reading. Ontario leads the provinces with over 735 million minutes spent reading in 2019, out-reading British Columbia and Alberta combined at 270 million each.

When it comes to eBooks, Canadians would rather indulge in fiction, given that only two of the top-selling eBooks fall into the nonfiction category, Michelle Obama’s Becoming and Tara Westover’s Educated.

Audiobooks are widely considered one of the fastest growing segments of the publishing industry. In fact, well over half of Canadian publishers are now producing audiobooks. Kobo’s own research has found that 41% of eBook readers are also audiobook listeners, and that while eBook readers trend slightly older, Millennials are listening to audiobooks at higher rates (47%) than their Boomer counterparts (33%).

From coast to coast, these audiobooks consistently ranked in the top 10 sold:

Peak summer continues to be a reading primetime

  • August proves to be the month when Canadians (and the world) read the most, spending over 180 million minutes reading in peak summer
  • That’s 18% higher than the next highest month, which is May

Young adult fiction isn’t just a teenage dream

  • Young adult fiction isn’t just for teenagers: 9 out of 10 provinces count young adult fiction in the top 3 genres read, by anyone of any age
  • The top two genres were Fiction and Biography/Autobiography
  • Quebec is the only province without YA in the top three, preferring a True Crime read instead

Canadian readers crave new voices

  • One in four of the titles sold by Kobo in Canada is by an independent author, published through Kobo Writing Life, Rakuten Kobo’s independent publishing platform
  • This is inline with a growing trend across Kobo’s major markets. For instance, upwards of 30 percent of the titles sold in Australia are from independent self-published authors, 27 per cent in the United States, and 20 per cent in the United Kingdom

But when it comes to perennial favourites, these are the authors Canada couldn’t get enough of:

  • Nora Roberts — 17.8 million minutes spent reading
  • James Patterson — 16.5 million minutes spent reading
  • David Baldacci — 15 million minutes spent reading

Canada’s top 10 bestselling books of 2019

Where the Crawdad’s Sing by Delia Owens is the top-selling book of 2019. Originally published in 2018—and a successful title from the get-go—Crawdad’s became the behemoth bestseller that it is today after it was chosen by Reese Witherspoon for Reese’s Book Club in the summer of 2018. By the end of the same year, the book had been optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine.

Listening is reading: Canada’s top 10 best selling audiobooks of 2019

Pageturners: The top 10 most-read books of 2019

As any booklover knows, what we buy isn’t always what we read (Hello, TBR pile). This year, the consensus was split, with just over half of the most-read list also appearing on the bestsellers. But there are a couple of surprises—some of the most-read books of the year, such as Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty (author of Big Little Lies) or The Reckoning by John Grisham, weren’t in the top-ten bestsellers.

Editor-in-chief | michael@goodereader.com

Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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