Before the era of online shopping, the department store Sears published its first holiday catalog in 1934. It started a tradition of kids circling pictures of toys they wanted from Santa and had adults bookmarking jewelry, appliances and more gift ideas. The nostalgic trend is being kept alive after Amazon began sending out its own toy catalogue in 2018 and is bringing it back this year. NBC’s Harry Smith reports in this week’s Sunday Spotlight.
more at: https://www.today.com/video/holiday-store-catalogs-are-returning-reviving-a-classic-tradition-127345733612
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The Association of American Publishers (AAP) today released its StatShot report for December 2020 reflecting reported revenue for all tracked categories, including Trade (Consumer Books), K-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses. Total revenues across all categories for December 2020 were down 8.5% as compared to December 2019, coming in at $1.1 billion. Year-to-date sales were flat, with an increase of 0.1% as compared to calendar 2019, with a total of $14.8 billion. Trade (Consumer Books) sales were up 9.5% in December, coming in at $796.1 million. For January-December 2020 Trade sales were up 9.7% as compared to the same period last year, coming in at $8.6 billion. In terms of physical paper format revenues during the month of December, in the Trade (Consumer Books) category, Hardback revenues were up 14.2%, coming in at $312.5 million; Paperbacks were up 2.4%, with $248.1 million in revenue; Mass Market was down 1.6% to $25.9 million; and Board Books were up 6.2%, with $16.7 million in revenue.
The streak is over. The long run of unit sales of print books posting weekly sales gains over the comparable week in 2020 came to an end last week, with units falling 1.3% compared to the week ending July 11, 2020, at outlets the report to NPD BookScan. The decline is the result of continued pressure on nonfiction sales, particularly adult nonfiction, the industry’s largest category. Print sales fell 10.2% compared to a year ago in adult nonfiction. Last year at this time, books on race and social justice spurred by the #blackoutbestsellerlist campaign continued to sell in large numbers, taking up six of the top ten slots at the time. And John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened, which was #1 on the category bestseller list, sold nearly 57,000 copies in the comparable week last year.
Quarter-to-date service performance data for July 1 through August 27 included: *First-Class Mail: Delivered 88.8 percent of First-Class Mail on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 1.3 percentage points from the third quarter. *Marketing Mail: Delivered 92.8 percent of Marketing Mail on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 1.8 percentage points from the third quarter. *Periodicals: Delivered 82.8 percent of Periodicals on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 3.5 percentage points from the third quarter. For the week of Aug. 21-27, the Postal Service achieved its highest level of service performance ever recorded for the Marketing Mail category (94.1%).