Book Buying Behavior: Where Purchased

Yesterday, I did a post that used some data from the 2010-2011 PubIt Book Consumer report. A number of comments questioned where the sales from this survey occurred. Well, ask and you shall receive.

To refresh your memory, the report in general comes from PubTrack (the consumer market research arm of Bowker) who recently released their 2010-2011 Book Buying Report. It collected buying behavior from 40,000 unique U.S. book buying men, women, and teens. The sample represents more than 96,000 unique book purchases and 65,000 shopping occasions. Here is what their study said about how where the purchases occurred:


My take on this data:

• As Ridan's business model is based on E-Commerce purchases, I'm pleased that this venue was the largest percentage of the sales.
  
  
• I'm not sure what "Non Traditional" means. I guess if I had the full report it would explain this category in more detail. I'm going to try and find out.
  


• I'm going to be watching the numbers for supermarket, warehouse clubs and mass merchandisers. With the collapse of Borders and the continuing problems at Barnes and Noble I have some concern that if these venues disappear so too will the mid-list shrink. Supermarket, warehouse and mm focus on the big-name cheap paperback books and growth here will be somewhat disturbing for a large number of authors.
  
  
• Large chains were still selling well during this report. It will be VERY interesting to see what this will be in the next report.
  


• It will also be interesting to see what happens with Independents as the large chains continue to close stores.

So there you go, all in all I think the survey did a good job of getting a nice "cross section" of book buyers. Any predictions going forward?