Children's book sales soar back to magical days of Harry Potter

Children's book sales last year reached their highest level since the final Harry Potter instalment, with the success of titles by David Walliams and YouTube star Zoella offsetting fears that young people are reading less.

The performance is a relief for the publishing industry, which is squeezed by competition from other online pursuits and by the decline of high-street book stores.

Dominic Knight, president of the Publishers Association, said that children's books had been the "star of consumer publishing".

British publishers' sales of children's and young adult books rose 11 per cent to £349m in 2014, the best performance since 2007, when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released.

Publishers increasingly see themselves in competition with social media, computer games and online video. However, several of the most popular children's titles showed the possibilities for collaboration with those sectors. Four handbooks related to Minecraft, the computer game, sold a total of 1.8m copies.

Meanwhile Girl Online, the ghostwritten novel by online video star Zoella, sold nearly 240,000 copies following its release in November. The success of Zoella, and her fellow YouTube star Alfie Deyes, has come as traditional celebrity titles lose impetus.

Publishers' overall sales dipped 2 per cent to £3.3bn in 2014. It is the second year of decline after a Fifty Shades of Grey-induced peak.

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Ebooks now make up about one-third of publishers' sales, but account for less than one-tenth of sales of children's books. "Parents genuinely want to buy a physical product that they can read to their child," said Douglas McCabe, an analyst at Enders Analysis.

David Walliams' Awful Auntie, published by News Corp's HarperCollins, was the most popular children's title of the year, selling 554,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Across various categories, "book-buying will probably remain relatively robust", Mr McCabe said, although he added that the "single biggest risk" could be the decline of high-street bookstores.

UK publishers also renewed their call for the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate Amazon, the country's largest bookseller.

This week the European Commission launched its proposals for a "digital single market", including an inquiry into tactics used by online retailers.

"Online ecommerce platforms are clearly under the microscope there," said Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association.

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