Book Exports Grow Almost 5% in 2000

U.S. book publishers made some encouraging inroads into expanding their overseas market share during 2000, after having little success during the previous two years. The value of books exported by U.S. publishers totaled an estimated $4.227 billion during the year, an increase of 4.8% from the export total recorded during 1999. Book exports had declined in both 1998 and 1999.

Although booksellers in the United States continue to import far less in the way of books and other printed materials than U.S. publishers export, book imports grew at a faster rate than exports during 2000. Consequently, the nation's surplus position in this product category continued to shrink, as it has done, in fact, during just about every year of the past decade.

Book imports (in dollar-value terms) increased by 7.3% during 1999 and by 8.0% during both 1997 and 1998, while total exports over the three-year period fell slightly. Last year, an estimated $3.259 billion worth of books and other printed material was imported into the United States. This represented growth of 11.1% over the 1999 total, more than twice the 4.8% increase in exports between 1999 and 2000.