Monday, December 15, 2014

Teens and Reading

Lots of interesting food for thought in this Nielsen survey: Nielsen Books and Consumers U.S.

The teaser is that despite their growing up with technology as much a part of their lives as anything else, teens lag behind other age groups in ebook purchasing. There are a number of reasons posited for this seemingly strange result. Among them are obvious ones, such as teens are much less likely to have credit cards with which to buy econtent. I think this is a bit of a stretch though, considering every teen I know uses a parent's card or gift cards to Amazon or iTunes for digital content. Another theory is that teens share a lot of books and that is MUCH easier to do with a printed book than with econtent. This seems more plausible to me. It makes me wonder though what more we could be doing as a library to cater to the reading tastes of teens. How can we be more responsive in our collection development and reach out to these younger readers in the same way we've traditionally reached out to other groups of readers.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Tarzan, John Carter, and Julian?

This month, our science fiction discussion group jumped in to the way-back machine and read the first part of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "The Moon Maid". This is a future history story of Earth Burroughs began in 1919. It is pretty safe to say that we agreed this particular story has not stood the test of time. Burroughs didn't spend much time thinking through any of the science, even of his day, around physics, planetary science, etc. The image I had in my mind of the story's narrator was that of the "Great White Hunter" or European gentleman explorer on a trip to some "savage" land like Africa and reporting his observations of the savage peoples he encounters through the thoroughly prejudiced eyes of a man of his time. I guess for me it ended up being more like a fantasy adventure story or western-like story that happened to take place on the moon.

On the plus side, we had candy and cookies and a good discussion of the future reading list!

If you are interested in joining us in 2015, please contact me at gwamsley@hutchpl.org. We have the first 3 months worth of books lined up, but all bets are off after that. each member will be bringing 4-6 suggested titles, we'll combine them in a list and vote on what to read to fill out 2015. Also, at least one choice should have a movie version to go along with it. Finally, we are open to considering a different meeting time if that helps grow the group. Currently, we meet the first Thursay of each month at 7pm.

Next month - Alan Moore's Watchmen