Religious books sales revenue in the U.S. 2017-2021

In 2021, religious books generated 705.1 million U.S. dollars in sales revenue, surpassing 700 million U.S. dollars for the first time according to the available data. Religious book sales grew consecutively in each year since 2017 (with the exception of a small dip in 2019), and the majority of revenue is generated via hardback sales.

Is the U.S. book market still healthy?

U.S. book store sales on the whole have been in decline in recent years. The sales revenue peaked at over 17 billion U.S. dollars in 2007 but has since shrunk to less than 11 billion. However, net revenue of the book publishing industry as a whole has remained comparatively stable – the 25.82 billion U.S. dollars recorded in 2018 was not dissimilar to the 2008 figure of 26.5 billion. Some categories are more successful than others, with higher education book materials seeing a decline in revenue whilst adult fiction and non-fiction books have shown improvement.

Whilst it is true that digital media has had a profound and ongoing impact on print, books have fallen less foul to this trend than other formats, namely newspapers, which have been struggling for years. News consumers and magazine readers have moved online, whereas print books are still popular among U.S. readers. The vast majority of respondents to a 2019 survey confirmed that they had read a print book in the last year, and U.S. adults cite multiple benefits to reading physical books. As the music industry has seen a resurgence in popularity of vinyl records, print books remain valuable to U.S. consumers.