Score: Teen Fiction 1, Video games 0

An encouraging piece of news appeared in Newsweek’s web edition on May 19:

Generation R (R Is for Reader)

The book business may be flat, but there’s at least one bright spot: the booming sales of books for teens–and no, it’s not all Harry Potter. Contrary to the depressing proclamations that American teens aren’t reading, the surprising truth is they are reading novels in unprecedented numbers. Young-adult fiction (ages twelve to eighteen) is enjoying a bona fide boom with sales up more than 25 percent in the past few years, according to a Children’s Book Council sales survey. Virtually every major publishing house now has a teen imprint, many bookstores and libraries have created teen reading groups and an infusion of talented new authors has energized the genre.

And one publishing executive quoted sheds some light on a trend that might be behind this development:

“because of MySpace, Facebook, blogs and authors’ and publishers’ Web sites, young readers are communicating interactively now with each other and with authors.” Another reason for the YA boom cited by Levithan and others is that teen books have become an integral part of today’s overall pop-culture entertainment menu. They segue into television series, movies, videogames, cartoons and the Internet. If teens see that, say, “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” is coming out in theaters, they’ll read the book in advance of the movie.

This is a trend that smart publishers will pick up on, and leverage the rise of social media to drive a huge market that lives on the net to become lifelong readers. Think of it: releasing a new chapter a week of an up and coming YA author’s latest novel in digital format, building audience and loyalty as readers post them on their blogs, on their Facebook page, create fan clubs, etc. THis is one use case in which free will lead to higher sales, because unless everyone has a Kindle (or possibly an iPhone), many readers will opt to go out and buy the book rather than read the whole thing on a tiny cellphone screen. Maybe this strategy would’t move the needle on sales of Harry Potter books, but there are plenty of lesser known works that could find a new audience using this approach. It could also breathe new life into publisher’s backlist.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/136961/page/1

Cracks in the Dam: Publishers dabble in digital tales

The following appeared in the May 22 edition of Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper:

A pair of Canadian book publishers dipped their toes ever deeper into the online world this week by offering free digital downloads of entire books. House of Anansi Press and HarperCollins Canada have decided to make the full text of a single book available to readers for a limited time, hoping to attract new readers, raise the authors’ profiles and boost sales of traditional copies. Jon Evans’s mass-market paperback Invisible Armies can be read for free until June 30 through the HarperCollins read-only interface called Browse Inside, which normally allows readers access to excerpts of books. HarperCollins chose Evans because of his enthusiasm for the experiment and for his status as an established writer with a solid following that they hope to expand.

While it’s encouraging to see a publisher go out on a digital limb, one has to wonder whether they have thought through the best way to proceed in this Brave New World:

“We didn’t feel like we were going to risk anything in terms of the book’s sales,” Anansi president Sarah MacLachlan said. “I could be delusional in this, but I really don’t think the digital book has come of age, so I don’t think that people would prefer to read something digitally than they would to own the actual book.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080522.wbooks22/BNStory/Entertainment/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20080522.wbooks22

Now there’s an example of innovative, cutting edge thinking: “We can give it away, because nobody really wants it anyway.” Not,  “How can we use this new medium to build market share and capture an audience that we couldn’t reach before?”  To show how ill-conceived their strategy is, when I went to their website, I was able to download the PDF file of the book without even registering! I then emailed it to my Kindle, where is is quite readable.

If the Anansi executive had discussed this approach with Leslie Hulse, Vice President of Digital Business Development at HarperCollins (parent of Anansi Press) who spoke at the International Digital Publishers Forum on MAy 14, she would have heard her say: “People will register for free content”. (For a look at a site that takes this premise to a higher level, check out www.wowio.com, where users are asked to complete a fairly detailed profile in order to download a free e-book daily.)   Harper Collins is arguably the furthest along in experimenting with digital content, with their “Browse Inside” feature, which looks a lot like Amazon’s “Search Inside” option. It actually lets you read quite a bit of the book online (in a few cases, all of it) (http://www.harpercollins.com/book/browseinsidemain.aspx) But I think they’ve still got some work to do on the pricing model. The books I looked at listed for $24.95 for the hardcover edition, and $19.95 for the e-book version (full DRM included at no extra charge). Not exactly a compelling enough discount to try out a new format. (“Let’s not risk those margins”)  They do however, require registration in order to download the occasional free e-book they offer. Maybe the Anansi folks should check it out.