The pie charts provide a sales breakdown of five different book genres in 1972, 1992 and 2012.
Overall, the proportion of adult fiction sales, dominating in 1992 and 2012, increased significantly over the period, and so did children’s fiction genre, albeit by a smaller degree. By contrast, travel, biography and other categories experienced a decline in their shares, with travel and biography representing the smallest figures.
Two categories out of five, both types of fiction, witnessed a rise in sales. Both adult and children’s fiction books shared an identical percentage of sales in 1972, at a fifth. After a 5-percent growth, the figure for the former almost doubled to finish at 45%. The latter’s sales, meanwhile, had grown gradually to a quarter by 2012.
The reverse was seen in the remaining categories. The sales of “others” and biography more than halved over the period, from 25 to 12 and from 20 to 8 percent respectively. Travel, by comparison, demonstrated a slightly different trend: its sales initially grew marginally by 3% from the initial value of 15%, before going down to a tenth.