Do kids still want books?

A very interesting article at PublishersWeekly.com today: What Do Children's Book Consumers Want?.

It is a reassuring look at the state of entertainment in kids' lives today:

""Children's books are not going anywhere. They're going to be a very secure category in the marketplace," said former Association of Booksellers for Children executive director Kristen McLean during a presentation at the ABA's Winter Institute with Kelly Gallagher, v-p of publishers services at Bowker/PubTrack. That, coupled with the fact that bookstores continue to play a key role as a driver of sales, were among the highlights of a joint consumer study with Bowker and ABC (now a part of the ABA), which was also presented at Digital Book World last week.

Sponsored by Random House, Macmillan, Penguin, Scholastic, and Little, Brown, the survey, which is available from Bowker, examines consumer attitudes toward purchasing children's books in three categories: adults buying for children ages 0–6, adults buying for children ages 7–12, and teen consumers ages 13–17."

Under the question "How important are the following media for children 0-6?" Parents gave 7.8 out of 10 (max importance) to Books, 6.5/10 for Childrens's dvds, followed by Television, Educational Websites (5.5), Board Games, Chidren's Magazines, and then we finally get to the digital media (other than the highly ranked educational websites: I myself prefer my son visit them than watch tv): Video Game Systems: 4.3, Handheld Games 4.2, Online Games 4.2.

Turns out small kids are online a lot: over half the kids 0-6 went online 57% of thee time, only one percent point less than they read a book for school or for fun. Interestingly only 9% read an e-book.

Middle age kids are online a bit less: one third of the kids 7-12 go on line a moderate amount, 43% at least a little bit and 12% are frequent Internet users. I would venture that the small kids growing up with the internet will be a generation who have grown up saturated in internet and will consider it as much a part of daily life as my generation did with tv (disclosure: I was 0-6 yrs old in the 60's! My parents was the last generation before mine to not watch tv at home all the time).

Teens spend a lot of time online, but still 39% of them read print books for fun. And despite being online a lot (esp texting and Facebook etc), over 80% don't read e-books and only 5% saying they do frequently.

Does this mean that printed books are here to stay, or that simply e-books are so new that parents haven't gotten around to buying them for kids, or that kids aren't accustomed to reading e-books but will switch over, just as iPods took over from discmans and walkmans? We'll see.

But in general... it looks like books are still winners from both the smaller kids (whose parents shop for them) and the teens (who choose for themselves) when it comes to enjoyable free time. Excellent news for my industry.

Hopefully schools and municipalities will sit up and take notice and stop trying to phase out libraries for computers and digital media (turns out that kids get the majority of books they read at school and public libraries). As libraries account for a great portion of publishers' sales, this is good news. Library copies are also better bound (hardcover, library bindings) so the cover price is higher and the creators get a higher per book royalty.

And good news for bookstores (most people buy books in real stores rather than online: I hadn't realized that amazon.com would rank so low as a purchasing destination for consumers).

Forward and onward with Children's Books!