European publishers earn \u20ac24.6bn but sell fewer books, Frankfurt hears

Europe's publishers earned €24.6 billion in 2025, down 1.2% from €24.9 billion in 2024. The figures were presented on October 7 at Frankfurter Buchmesse, the annual rights fair in Frankfurt where publishers buy and sell books across territories, by Federation of European Publishers (FEP) President Sonia Draga and Deputy Director Enrico Turrin, according to figures reported by Publishing Perspectives.

Fewer books. Higher prices. That is the short version of the FEP's message: nominal turnover, meaning sales before adjusting for inflation, stays high while the number of copies sold keeps slipping.

In cash terms, 2025 turnover was still above the previous peak of €24.5 billion set in 2007. Adjusted for inflation, the picture reverses. FEP put real-terms turnover at €15.2 billion, down from €22.9 billion in 2007. Book prices rose 43.8% between 2001 and 2025, against a 75.4% rise in overall consumer prices, using Eurostat data cited by FEP. The federation warned that the real-terms value of the trade is down 30%, with a decline in reading described as the main threat, as reported by The Bookseller.

Print remains the core of the business, but it is shrinking. About 2.4 billion print books were sold in Europe in 2025. In a sample covering 75% of European turnover, print units are down 6% since 2021, or about 110 million copies. New titles, meaning books published for the first time, slipped to 570,000, compared with a 2017 peak of 610,000. FEP valued the wider European book market at cover price, meaning the price printed on the jacket before discounts, at €35.3 billion, likely rising to €36-39 billion once exports, imports and self-publishing are counted.

The country pattern was uneven. Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands led Europe by publisher turnover, meaning money received by publishers rather than total retail spending. In 2025, publisher turnover grew 8.8% in Sweden, 3.3% in Spain and 2% in the U.K., while Germany fell 2.9% and Poland fell 3.8%. Early 2026 data pointed the same way. Italy was up 5.1% in the first half of 2026, Spain up 3.9% and the U.K. up 1.5%, while Germany was down 4.1%, France down 5% through August, and Poland down 11.7%.

Spain stood out for consistency. Domestic publisher turnover reached €3.14 billion, and FEP described Spain as the only major European market on a growth run of more than a decade.

Format and shelf data show print still dominant, audio rising fast from a small base. Print accounted for 81.6% of European publisher turnover, followed by digital books at 13.1% and audio at 5.3%, up from 2.5% in 2021. In 2025, audiobooks grew 53.3% in Spain and 13.3% in Italy, while ebooks grew 29.1% in Germany. Bookshops held 48.1% of book sales in Europe and online retail held 23.6%. Children's books accounted for 15.2% of publisher turnover and are rising. Academic and professional titles, including textbooks and specialist works, shrank from 21.5% of turnover in 2008 to 14.8%.

Cross-border trade stayed close to balance. The European Union imported €1.84 billion of books in 2024 and exported €1.75 billion. The U.K. is the EU's largest book trade partner, at €607 million in imports and €297 million in exports. Trade with the United States was roughly balanced at €237 million in imports and €285 million in exports, while China sold €567 million to the EU and bought €46 million. Exports represented 20.6% of European publishers' turnover.

What makes this stand out is the reading side of the ledger. In 2022, 47.2% of Europeans aged 16 and over read no book at all, according to Eurostat. The average reading score across 23 OECD countries in the PISA school assessment fell from 493 in 2018 to 466 in 2025. For publishers, that frames the Frankfurt arithmetic: turnover can hold up for a time on price, while fewer copies and fewer readers point to pressure ahead.