Bulgaria printed 124 more books and pamphlets in 2025 than the year before, a rise of 1.2%. The numbers come from "Book Publishing and Printing 2025", a report the National Statistical Institute published on its website.
Print runs fell, though, from 5,297,385 copies in 2024 to 4,438,491 in 2025.
Publishers put out 8,939 book titles last year and 1,328 pamphlets, with a combined print run of 874,035 copies. The year before, there were 8,891 books and 1,252 pamphlets, with a print run of 1,009,001 copies.
Fiction for adults topped the list with 2,743 titles and a print run of 1,136,000. Non-fiction came next with 2,663 titles and a print run of 389,000, followed by popular science and general-interest books with 2,066 titles and a print run of 1,005,000. Textbooks had fewer titles, 1,325, but the biggest print run of all: 1,753,000.
Books for children and teenagers made up 1,160 titles with a print run of 913,000; of these, 723 titles with a print run of 528,000 were children's fiction. Another 310 titles with a print run of 116,000 fell into the "other" category.
Most books, 8,182 titles or 79.7% of the total, were printed in the language they were originally written in, including Bulgarian. Translations accounted for 2,085 titles with a print run of 1,512,000, and more than half of them, 50.9%, were translated from English. French made up 10.3%, Russian 6% and German 5.8%.
Sofia city and region printed more books and pamphlets than anywhere else in Bulgaria, with 6,527. Plovdiv came second with 876, and Varna third with 519.
There were 167 newspaper titles, with a combined annual print run of 88,501,000 copies. That is 11 fewer than in 2024, when there were 178 titles with a print run of 95,623,000, after a drop of two the year before that. Weeklies were the most common, with 76 titles. Sofia and its region accounted for 73 newspapers, or 43.7% of the national total.
Magazines numbered 477 and bulletins 48, up 9.9% and 2.1% respectively on 2024. Eighty-six magazines and bulletins came out in foreign languages, most of them in English — 74 titles with a print run of 115,000. Three titles were printed in Romanian.