Religious Book Sales

The IHS:HNN reports on the -10.2% drop in sales from 2005 to 2006 in religious books as indicated by the report of the AAS. Truthfully, it seems they IHS:HNN "spun" this when really it is a non-story. They try to make it sound positive for the drop in those books, concomitant with the rise in sales for "The God Delusion", "God is not great"...etc. The first issue is that I am not sure that books on atheism are not actually included in this same category. The second is that statistically, religious book sales have grown at 3x the rate of other sales from 2002-06.

You can get the full details in the .pdf, which shows the following numbers:
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2002: 556799
2003: 836312 | change from previous year: +50% | all books change: +1.5%
2004: 888145 | change from previous year: +5.6% | all books change: +2.9%
2005: 829273 | change from previous year: -6.1% | all books change: +5.5%
2006: 744687 | change from previous year: -10.2% | all books change: -0.3%
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compound change from 2002-2006: religious +7.5% | all books +2.4%

Honestly, it seems like nothing to me. If anything, religious reading has been slightly down for two years, but after the huge bump in 2003, it has still grown 3 times faster than all other book categories. I was a bit miffed to read this poor a presentation by the IHS:HNN.

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Technorati tags: God, Religion