Annual Report 2001/02

Books and Audio Books

We sold over 16 million books and audio products around the world

It was an outstanding year for our Consumer Publishing business. Landmark television programming across factual, children’s and cookery genres formed the basis for the 16 million books and audio products sold during the year, while the business as a whole underwent further dramatic growth through acquisition.

In July 2001, we acquired Chivers Communications plc, a major publisher of unabridged audio books on tape. Chivers has a catalogue of over 3000 unabridged readings of popular fiction by authors such as Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, EM Forster and Joanna Trollope as well as over 500 novels in large print book format.

With a publishing and distribution subsidiary in the USA – the world’s biggest spoken word market – the acquisition of Chivers places us in prime position for expansion in key markets and has performed above plan to date.

During the previous year, BBC Worldwide acquired Cover to Cover, another of the UK’s major unabridged spoken word publishers, whose catalogue includes works by authors such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Dick King-Smith. Through this acquisition we also gained the spoken word licence for the first four Harry Potter novels, and these proved runaway bestsellers for us during the Christmas period.

We match editorial strength with a strong focus on marketing and distribution and a shrewd understanding of our customers in all sectors. Our top 10 sellers alone accounted for the sale of over one million books over the year in the UK, while the two month period to Christmas was the most successful ever with sales up 14% year-on-year.

This year saw a strong range of best-selling titles including Delia’s How to Cook: Book Three, The Blue Planet,Simon Schama’s A History of Britain Volume II, and Walking with Beasts: A Prehistoric Safari. We continued to achieve strong sales with cookery books by popular BBC chefs like Rick Stein and Gary Rhodes, while Alan Titchmarsh’s How to be a Gardener became BBC Worldwide’s fastest-selling gardening hardback ever, going straight into the bestseller list and selling 100,000 copies within nine weeks of publication.

This year, we also added further titles to our newly-developed range of celebrity biographies and autobiographies, with Sir Clement Freud’s Freud Ego, Bob Harris’s The Whispering Years and Gerry Anderson’s What Made Thunderbirds Go!

BBC Books has built an enviable reputation and is long-established in the UK. We are now actively exploring opportunities to grow our business internationally, whether organically or through acquisitions or partnerships.