Podcast, episode 191.

Mark interviews Dr. Rachel Noorda and Dr. Kathi Inman Berens about the Immersive Media & Books 2020 Consumer Survey conducted by the Panorama Project and Portland State University.

Key discussion points:

• Behaviors related to “engagement” with books that don’t necessarily include buying or reading them
• The survey was made up of people who “engaged with a book” at least once in the past 12 months
• An OverDrive study and a 2019 PEW research study and that both estimate between 75% and 85% of people have engaged with a book in the previous year
• How books are a very durable 500-year success story, according to Dr. Berens, that people have incredibly powerful feelings and emotions about -Some of the research that revealed surprising results
• Bookstores are not just a showroom for Amazon. Purchases are more of a 50/50 split.
• The biggest single realm of book discoverability (20%) is from friends, but 80% of the time people are finding books from a multitude of other means.
• The difficulty of measuring or finding the typical 6 touch points a person needs to have with a book before they decide to purchase/read it
• All of the things that happen in purchasing behavior that we (as authors and publishers, and even as consumers) are not aware of
• How the Immersive Media report does have a specific section for authors
• The high relevance of “genre” and “favorite author” when it comes to deciding to buy a book
• How readers are often expecting some kind of “online access” to authors
• The “literary citizenship” that Jane Friedman talks about in her book THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WRITER