Book production in the U.S. last year totaled 172,000 titles, a decrease from 2004 of 18,000 titles, or nearly ten percent, according to a recent study by R. R. Bowker, the publisher of the Books in Print database and the official agency for assigning ISBNs in the United States. Specific categories of titles showed double-digit declines. The number of new adult fiction titles decreased by twenty-five percent, from 28,010 to 20,865, and the combined number of poetry and drama titles declined by 28 percent, from 6,920 to 4,982.
Last year’s total marks the first time U.S. book production has fallen since 1999, and only the tenth time in the last fifty years. The decline makes Great Britain, which increased its production of new titles by twenty-eight percent, to 206,000, the country with the largest number of new books published in English.
For more information about the study, visit www.bowker.com.
