Christian publishers have expressed mixed reactions about a bullish new report on religious book sales.

According to Book Industry Trends 2008, a comprehensive view of U.S. book publishing dollar and unit sales, the religion segment increased 5.6% from 2007 to 2008 after rising 6.3% from 2006 to 2007.

However, Thomas Nelson Publishers President and CEO Michael Hyatt told Christian Retailing that the Christian book market was inaccurately represented in the report, which lumped evangelical books with New Age, other religions and atheism titles such as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin) in the Religion category.

"Even Amazon.com shows Dawkins' (book) as number six on their Christian best-seller list," said Hyatt, noting that Nelson's 4% sales increase in 2007 "was modest, but we still had a very profitable year."

Book Industry Study Group (BISG) statistician Al Greco said the report included data "on all religious books from all religious book publishers, not just Christian books."

Michael Covington, technology and information officer for the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, said while BISG's report covered a wide spectrum of religious titles, the overall tenor about Christian books was very positive.

At Zondervan, President and CEO Moe Girkins said the company had good sales from books not categorized as religious such as Take the Risk by Ben Carson, which was released in January. "Zondervan considers it a Christian book because Carson shares some of his Christian journey and prayers throughout the book," Girkins said.

Read the full report in the July 7 issue of Christian Retailing International.