Dear Geist,

Is it true that Canadian and American publishers enjoyed high sales of books during the early months of the pandemic in the spring of 2020? I read that book publishing companies were shutting down!

—Carol Reader, Peachland BC

Dear Carol,

You’re right on both scores. Soon after schools shut down in spring, a lot of workers were sent home to work, and children were pulled out of school, and for a few weeks almost no new books for adults or children were shipped to anyone. But TV, streaming and other home-based entertainment was plentiful, and did not involve touching.

Reading is something else, and readers began to order books by the stack as soon as they could get them.

Even then it was hard to acquire some titles. The fly in the ointment in both Canada and the US was that one of the USA’s two largest printing companies sold itself to another company. The other one shut down, citing the pandemic.

Book publishers and groups began changing the release date for some of their lead titles, as book festivals and other gatherings were cancelled or rescheduled. Fall is the usual season for presenting new lead titles, but publishers were pushing the new books well into 2021.

What about a shift to eBooks? Well, not as far as some publishers had hoped. An awful lot of people working at home—alone or with little kids—would rather have the print versions.

So, some stores did better than ever before in the weeks between March and May, once they got over the initial shock of it, and they kept buying. Lockdowns were observed; the book buyers pressed on.

In both Canada and the US, trackers reported that adult nonfiction sales were healthy, as were political books, and there was “brisk trade in civil rights and discrimination titles.” In both countries, big new sellers by Stephenie Meyer and Suzanne Collins accounted for a good bit of the sales spike.

Bottom line: Book sales in all categories in both Canada and the US were down about 4 percent total from March to September. Everyone in the business looks forward to the analysis, but even in these early days it’s a heck of a good show for customers who are barely allowed to go out.

In August and September, both Canada and the USA have reported that the early troubles of the pandemic months are calming down nicely. For our booksellers, who have taken some particularly tough blows, we hope that this trend continues!

—The Editors