Costco plans to stop selling books outside the holiday season, publishing execs say

• Costco plans to stop selling books on a regular basis, publishing execs told The New York Times.
• They said Costco would sell books only for the holidays and maybe on some other occasions.

Costco plans to stop selling books on a regular basis, largely because of how much labor it requires, four unidentified publishing executives told The New York Times.

They said the warehouse giant would stop stocking books regularly from January and would instead sell books between September and December for the holidays, as well as potentially selling some books sporadically at other times of the year.

Costco didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider made outside regular US working hours.

The executives said the decision was mainly down to staffing demands. Stocking books requires large amounts of labor as they have to be laid out manually by workers rather than rolled out on a pallet and replaced frequently, they said.

The Times reported that Costco had already stopped sales of books in some areas, including Alaska and Hawaii.

Reddit users have lamented the decision, with many arguing Costco should at least continue to sell children's books.

"Stopping selling kids books would be like cancelling the hot dog in the food court," one user commented.

Sales of books at non-bookstores such as Costco are largely impulse purchases, with shoppers going to their local warehouses to stock up on groceries and perhaps adding eye-catching books to their carts. As the Times pointed out, not all of these sales are expected to be transferred to other retailers.

The market-research company Circana found that US sales of print books dropped 3% in 2023 compared with the prior year, with the biggest decline in children's books. There were fewer sales of children's fantasy, magic, and humor books, as well as non-fiction, but adult-fiction sales grew, led by fantasy, romance, coming-of-age, and historical-fiction books, Circana found.

BookTok has been credited with boosting print-book sales in an age of Kindles and other e-readers. The publisher Bloomsbury reported record sales in the year to February 29, which it credited largely to the fantasy author Sarah J. Maas, whose series "A Court of Thorns and Roses" has become a BookTok darling.