U.S. Consumer Time Spent With Media Fell For First Time In 2023 (mediapost.com)

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) today released its StatShot report for January 2022 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 January 2022 were up 3.7% as compared to January 2021, coming in at $1.3 billion.

Revenues increased 2% as growth in both recurring and transactions revenues was partly offset by a decline in Global Print revenues and a negative impact from foreign currency that reduced revenues by $6 million (approximately 1%). *As expected, organic revenues increased 2%, driven by 4% growth in both recurring revenues, which comprised 80% of total revenues, and transactions revenues. *The company’s “Big 3” segments (Legal Professionals, Corporates and Tax & Accounting Professionals), which collectively comprised 79% of total revenues, reported organic revenue growth of 5%. Operating profit increased primarily due to lower costs and higher revenues. Lower costs reflected the completion of the repositioning of the company in 2019 following the separation from the Financial & Risk (F&R) business and lower expenses from the company’s COVID-19-related efforts to mitigate 2020 annual costs by $100 million. Lower costs were partly offset by higher depreciation and amortization and a lower benefit from the revaluation of warrants that the company holds in Refinitiv relating to the proposed sale of Refinitiv to London Stock Exchange Group plc (LSEG), which is discussed later in this news release.

In late 2010, I was thinking quite a bit about book use in research libraries. The conventional wisdom was that “no one uses print books anymore” in libraries like mine, and indeed annual data provided by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) showed a pretty clear decline in book circulations: between 1991 and 2008 (the most recent data available at that time), the number of initial circulations in ARL libraries had fallen by over a quarter. And when I ventured into the book stacks in my own library I usually found them spookily deserted. But I was haunted by a passing comment a colleague had made to me a few years earlier, noting that the conclusions we draw from library usage data can easily be confounded by changes in the library’s user population. It occurred to me that if we really want to understand what’s happening with regard to library patrons and printed books, we need to take into account the changing nature of our patron base. And the simplest and most consistent change in that population is growth over time: university enrollment tends to grow from year to year. Click Read More below for more of the story.