AAP May 2023 StatShot Report: Overall Publishing Industry Flat for Month of May, and Up 0.7% Year-To-Date

Amazon.com announced its selections for Best Books of the Year So Far, naming Tara Westover’s memoir Educated: A Memoir the top pick overall. The annual list is hand selected by the Amazon Books Editors and features the Top 20 books released between January and June 2018—offering readers a mid-year look at the best books. The Amazon Books Editors’ picks for the first 10 of the Top 20 Best Books of the Year So Far are: 1. Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover: Tara Westover didn’t see the inside of a classroom until she was seventeen, but it was an experience that dramatically changed the trajectory of her life. This stirring memoir chronicles how she survived her survivalist upbringing, eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge University. It’s a rousing reminder that knowledge is, indeed, power. 2. The Great Alone: A Novel by Kristin Hannah: In this pressure cooker of a page-turner, a damaged Vietnam vet moves his family to the wilds of Alaska. Initially it’s a welcome change, but as winter approaches, and his mental state deteriorates, his wife and daughter find themselves in an increasingly precarious position. Like her mega-bestselling The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone highlights the heroics of everyday people, especially women. 3. The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson: Clever, informative, and sometimes endearingly bumbling, this mix of natural history and crime opens up new worlds. Readers will never look at an old stuffed bird or an elaborately tied fishing fly the same way again. Click Read More below for additional information.

Total revenues across all categories for August 2024 were up 8.5% as compared to August 2023, coming in at $1.7 billion. Year-to-date revenues were up 7.8%, at $9.3 billion for the first eight months of the year. Trade (Consumer Books) revenues were up 13.4% in August, coming in at $848.2 million. In terms of physical paper format revenues during the month of August, in the Trade (Consumer Books) category, Hardback revenues were up 17.1%, coming in at $297.4 million; Paperbacks were up 6.7%, with $302.0 million in revenue; Mass Market was down 35.8% to $8.6 million; and Special Bindings were up 3.6%, with $21.5 million in revenue. eBook revenues were up 6.1% for the month as compared to August 2023 for a total of $90.4 million, and the Digital Audio format was up 38.8% for August, coming in at $93.9 million in revenue. Physical Audio was down 54.8% coming in at $600 thousand.

The United States Postal Service reported new delivery performance metrics showing the average time to deliver a mailpiece across the postal network continues is 2.7 days. Through March 18, Marketing Mail and Periodicals performance was consistent with the fiscal first quarter. The Postal Service continues its top-down focus on operational precision across the postal network to improve First-Class Mail performance evident in week over week performance to date in March. Second quarter service performance scores covering Jan.1 through March 18 included: *First-Class Mail: 86.7 percent of First-Class Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a decrease of 2.4 percentage points from the fiscal first quarter. *Marketing Mail: 92.1 percent of Marketing Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fiscal first quarter. *Periodicals: 81.4 percent of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fiscal first quarter.