Cookbooks and children's books were the strongest survivors amid sinking Australian book sales last year.

The best-selling title of the year, at 221,000 copies, was Jamie's 30-Minute Meals by the British TV chef Jamie Oliver.

Close behind was the US children's author Jeff Kinney with Cabin Fever, the sixth in his Wimpy Kid series, at 200,000, Nielsen BookScan's annual figures show. Kinney's books - written as simple diaries with stick-figure drawings - dominated the children's top 10 list.

However, these impressive figures conceal a dramatic but unsurprising fall in sales.

The 1000 bookshops surveyed by Nielsen BookScan reported 60.4 million sales, a drop of 7.1 per cent on the previous year. The value of sales fell 12.6 per cent to $1078 million (following a 4.2 per cent fall in 2010).

Despite strong pre-Christmas sales, the book industry was hit by the economic downturn and the flight of shoppers to the internet.

The closure of the Borders and Angus & Robertson bookstore chains owned by the collapsed REDgroup left the retail market 20 per cent smaller.

'Independent bookstores were reasonably buoyant, so they are picking up some of the sales,' the general manager of Nielsen BookScan Australia, Shaun Symonds, said.

The rise of e-books affected sales of print books, but there are no figures to quantify the impact.

The company was trying to devise a way to count Australian e-book sales, Mr Symonds said. 'But it's a global market rather than an Australian one.'

To show how even the top titles slid, in 2009 sales of 144,000 were only enough to place Matthew Reilly's The Five Greatest Warriors at No. 9 on a list led by blockbusters by Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown.

To read the full article from the Sydney Morning Herald:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/celebrity-chef-and-a-wimpy-kid-prove-page-turners-20120106-1pofc.html