Jul 02
One of the magazines I started getting automatically once I registered my publishing business/book is Book Business. In their current issue, I was especially interested in the following statistics under the heading “Who is Reading Books?” in one of the articles. Here is what they reported:
- The average age of today’s book reader is 44, but 50 is the average age of the most frequent book buyer.
- 58 percent of readers are women; 42 percent are men.
- Women purchase 65 percent of books.
- 50 percent of Americans ages 13 and older bought a book last year.
- 41 percent of all books purchased are by buyers earning less than $35,000/year.
- $10.08 is the average price paid for a book last year.
- 31 percent of in-store or online purchases are impulse buys.
(Statistics presented by Kelly Gallagher, general manager, Business Intelligence, for R.R. Bowker and chair of BISG’s research committee.)
September 5th, 2011 at 1:43 pm
Hi. Was curious, what year do these statistics apply to? (2010 from a 2011 article?) and/or what was the date of the Book Business magazine article? THANKS!
September 5th, 2011 at 5:05 pm
I think it was the May/June 2011 issue of the magazine, so I assume these stats refer to 2010. That’s my guess, anyway!
January 8th, 2013 at 3:40 pm
Thanks for the helpful info! I found this via a Google search for “book reader demographics”. It seems the ideal book buying reader is a 44- to 50-year-old woman with ten bucks to spare.