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.