The growing complexity of the children’s digital
market was parsed by industry experts at the Publishers Launch
Children's Publishing Goes Digital Conference in New York on January 15,
as panelists and speakers agreed that the transition from print to
digital will not be a clean, easy movement and that things are still
very much in the experimentation stage. The day-long conference kicked
off with the presentation of the findings from a recent study by Bowker
that found that among children, there has been a marked decline in
bookstore and library influence as a source of recommendation and
acquisition, and that many purchases are instead migrating online to
vendors like Amazon. The study is part of Bowker’s Understanding the Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age.
Friends and family overtook bookstore browsing and libraries as the
top influencers, painting the picture of the children’s book market as a
highly local word-of-mouth economy. The erosion of libraries and
bookstores may be misleading, though, as Gretchen Caserotti of the
Darien Public Library used a case study involving Adam Gidwitz’s A Tale Dark and Grimm,
which Caserotti said the library system recommended to the local school
systems, and that based on the library’s recommendation (and a local
award for the book), the school system widely assigned the book in
classrooms. When asked how they heard about Grimm, students
would most often respond that they heard of it through friends, even
though the book was largely implemented because of the push of the
library.
The Bowker study had some surprises, most
notably: 84% of YA books were purchased by consumers 18 or older – and a
full 35% of YA books were bought by consumers aged 18-29, by far the
largest demographic. The second-largest demographic was age 30-44;
within that segment, dispelling the notion that the YA books are gifts
or purchases for teens, fully 80% of respondents reported “they bought
the book for themselves.”
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