AndrewTW Vintage Books

When we last looked at the sales scene in Scotland, we discovered that Scottish readers bought slightly more than expected – they were responsible for 8.3% of the UK’s total sales across the first 12 weeks of 2025, according to NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).

By the end of 2025, Scottish customers – who account for 8% of the total UK population – had managed to push that number up to 8.7% (for both volume and value), a slightly higher share of the year’s haul than they achieved in 2024. Volume in 2025 was down 1.5% in Scotland compared to the year before – but the UK in total saw its volume drop 2.5% – while value grew 0.3% versus a slip of 0.5% across the four home nations combined.

Things are looking even better for Scottish bookshops a third of the way into 2026:  across the first 16 weeks they have sold 4,464,783 books, up 0.4% compared to the equivalent period in 2025. Meanwhile, value in the same period has reached £41.2m, up 2.2%. Not only is that a good position year-on-year, but against a national backdrop where volume sales have shrunk 1.7% and value has grown 0.9%, it shows very positive signs for the bookselling scene here. The bestselling book in Scotland across the first 16 weeks of 2026 matches the rest of the UK: Bunny vs Monkey: Total Chaos!, Jamie Smart’s World Book Day (WBD) offering has sold 14,392 copies in Scotland, performing slightly above average as it claims 8.7% of the £1 book’s total sales. WBD (£1) has, predictably, done as well in Scotland as it has in the rest of the UK, with Scottish bookshops taking 8.4% of the campaign’s total sales, a very slight increase on 2025’s performance.