Finance

Cost cuts improved Scholastic's bottom line in the first quarter, but sales at book fairs and book clubs tumbled during the period, and are expected to remain low in the current quarter.

Sales of adult books rose 20.9% in the month over July 2019, and sales in the children/young adult category increased 14.5%, according to AAP's StatShot program. Sales in the K-12 instructional materials category fell 24.9% compared to last July, while sales in the higher educational course materials segment fell 21.9%.

Higher sales of a range of digital and online products offset continued declines in print revenue, leading to a 2% increase in sales in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 at John Wiley & Sons.

A good performance in the U.S. plus higher digital and online sales helped to soften the blow of the Covid-19 pandemic across Penguin Random House's global operations in the first half of 2020, parent company Bertelsmann said.

Following steep declines in April and May, sales fell a relatively modest 4.1% in June compared to a year ago at publishers that report to AAP's StatShot program. June sales were up in the trade categories.

An improvement in fourth quarter profits for the period ended June 30, 2020, was not enough to prevent earnings for the full year at HarperCollins from dropping 15%, to $214 million. Revenue fell 5%, to $1.67 billion, compared to fiscal 2019.

A 38% plunge in sales in its education group in the second quarter of 2020 led to an overall decline of 35.5% in sales at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt compared to a year ago. Costs cuts limited the impact of the sales drop on the publisher's bottom line.

Lower production and distribution costs were enough to give Simon & Schuster a 9% increase in earnings in the second quarter, despite an 8% drop in sales. Digital revenue jumped 44% in the quarter.

Online sales at Amazon jumped 48% in the second quarter of 2020 over the comparable period in 2019, to $45.9 billion. Total revenue rose 40% and operating income skyrocketed 87%.

Final estimates from the AAP found a 1.1% increase in total industry sales in 2019 over 2018. Sales were estimated to be $25.93 billion. The increase was led by a 20.4% jump in sales in the preK-12 category, where sales were $4.07 billion. In the trade category, sales inched ahead 0.4%, to $16.23 billion.