Booksellers See Subdued In-Store Holiday Sales, Online Eruption (publishersweekly.com)

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) today released its StatShot report for September 2023 reflecting reported revenue for Trade (Consumer Books), Higher Education Course Materials, and Professional Publishing. Total revenues across all categories for September 2023 were flat as compared to September 2022, coming in at $1.4 billion. Year-to-date revenues were up 0.8%, at $9.4 billion for the first nine months of the year. Trade (Consumer Books) revenues were down 0.4% in September, coming in at $905.9 million. In terms of physical paper format revenues during the month of September, in the Trade (Consumer Books) category, Hardback revenues were up 7.2%, coming in at $379.2 million; Paperbacks were down 4.9%, with $299.1 million in revenue; Mass Market was down 39.5% to $11.3 million; and Special Bindings were up 11.8%, with $27.1 million in revenue.

The United States Postal Service reported new delivery performance metrics for the fiscal second quarter dating through the month of March. Through the second quarter, the average time for delivery of a mailpiece across the postal network was 2.7 days. First-Class Mail performance showed steady improvements over the past five consecutive weeks, reaching 93.9 percent for the week ending April 1. The latest performance scores for Marketing Mail reflect the two best consecutive quarters since measurement began in FY 2011. Second quarter service performance scores covering Jan.1 through April 1 included: *First-Class Mail: 87.9 percent of First-Class Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a decrease of 1.3 percentage points from the fiscal first quarter. *Marketing Mail: 92.6 percent of Marketing Mail deliver ed on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fiscal first quarter.*Periodicals: 81.9 percent of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 1 percentage point performance from the fiscal first quarter.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Wiley announced the launch of Wiley AI Partnerships: A Co-Innovation Program. This initiative aims to develop new AI applications, assistants, and agents in partnership with innovative companies, to empower researchers and practitioners and help drive the pace, efficiency and accuracy of scientific discovery. A new Wiley survey revealed that 69% of researchers want to keep up with or be ahead of the curve in AI adoption in their field. At the same time, they require better tools to streamline their research and are looking for guidance and training about how to use AI responsibly and effectively. This new program is intended to help solve these challenges in collaboration with partner companies and researchers with the goal of improving the efficiency and caliber of research worldwide. “Researchers and practitioners are seeking more than generic AI tools – they need relevant applications that enhance and support their research endeavors. This new partnership program is designed to meet these needs by inviting collaboration with start-ups and scale-ups to deliver specialized AI solutions,” said Josh Jarrett, Senior Vice President and General Manager for AI Growth at Wiley. “Our goal is to accelerate AI tool development to unlock new discoveries, empower researchers to uncover hypotheses, run analyses at scale, simulate experiments before wet lab investment, connect findings to existing research, and enable global collaboration.”