Are Teens Embracing E-books?
By Karen Springen
A recent PubTrak survey from R.R. Bowker indicated that teens remain reluctant when it comes to e-books. Accustomed to social media, they find that electronic stories have “too many restrictions,” according to the report. But many industry players—agents, booksellers, publishers, and authors—are saying just the opposite: digital sales are booming for YA fiction.
As evidence, over the recent holiday season Barnes & Noble sold five times as many YA e-titles as print ones online, says Jim Hilt, v-p of e-books for the chain. And at Amazon, there was a similar trend: “YA e-books are growing even faster than e-books overall in the Kindle Store,” Russ Grandinetti, v-p of Kindle Content, told PW in an e-mail.
As for the dreaded cannibalization of print, it does not appear to be happening in YA. “The whole pie grows,” says Hilt. “There’s a lot more evidence that users are going back and forth between digital and physical. People are now buying more books when they become digital readers. The key is to have the book available in all formats.”
About six weeks before some of its YA novels come out, Harper-Collins offers a “browse inside,” with free samples of 20% of the content. “We push it out everywhere,” says Diane Naughton, v-p of integrated marketing for HarperCollins. Last year, for example, the publisher ran the Dark Days of Supernatural promotion for 11 new YA books, with an online ad campaign, a video, and a Web site that linked readers to the program’s Twitter feed and Facebook page (with author tour information, among other things).
The publisher also publishes short novellas as extras. Before The Power of Six, the second book in Pittacus Lore’s I Am Number Four series, HarperCollins put out a $4.99 digital short that gave some backstory about the characters.