Christmas is nearly upon us, so we’re in prime shopping season for books: nearly a quarter of print book purchases in the UK stem from the last eight weeks of the year, as measured through BookScan. Of course, not all of those will be Christmas gifts; according to our monthly Books & Consumers survey, only about a fifth of print books bought in November and December the last two years were Christmas gifts. Looking at the full year, 5% of book purchases across all formats were intended as Christmas gifts in 2023 and 2024, adding up to about 37m books.
A large part of that is children’s books, accounting for more than 60% of Christmas gift purchases, as shown in the graph, followed by a quarter non-fiction and the remaining falling into adult fiction. For more specific genres, picture books are the most popular gifts, along with activity books and then children’s fiction and non-fiction, with auto/biographies as the leading type of adult non-fiction Christmas gifts.
The prevalence of children’s books in the gifting market is reflected in the recipients – nearly two in five books bought as Christmas gifts from 2023 to 2024 were intended for the buyer’s own child(ren), significantly ahead of grandchild(ren) at 16% and then spouse/partner at 10%. By age, 0-4s are the most popular group, slightly more so girls (15%) than boys (13%), although that changes as we move older, with boys aged 5 to 12 bought more books for Christmas than girls in that age band. In fact, if we look at the group that is most reliant on Christmas as a source of books, it’s boys aged 9 to 12, with Christmas gifts accounting for one in five books bought for this group from 2023 to 2024.
Certain genres are more dependent on the gifting season as well; above I mentioned what the top gifting genres were, but if look at that from a different angle, we can see which areas have the highest share of their purchases coming from Christmas. The very clear winner is children’s annuals, with half of those bought from 2023 to 2024 intended as Christmas gifts. Next in the list is somewhat related, with general reference the home to Guinness World Records, an annual festive bestseller. Eleven genres have at least 10% of their purchases come from Christmas gifts for these years, shown in the graph below, split across children’s (pink) and non-fiction (blue).
And all the way at the other end of the scale, just 0.8% of business/economics books were bought as Christmas gifts! Even just that small portion, and the fact that none of the genres in the list had zero Christmas gift purchases for this time frame, shows that there’s a bookish gift out there for everyone, and someone for every book. So here’s to books of all kinds bought at Christmas, whether for yourself or as a gift!
Data extracted from the NielsenIQ BookData Books & Consumers survey. For more information, please contact infobookresearch@nielseniq.com
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