If you're trying to do research as a book industry professional, you're going to hit paywalls—sometimes paywalls so large that your business is better off replacing NPD with a tarot deck and a crystal pendulum. Enter Dr. Kathi Berens and Dr. Rachel Noorda, who spoke with Emily about their 2020 research on Immersive Media & Books. Using the survey results from over 4,000 respondents, they got a multitude of insights about how Americans of all ages and ethnicities engage with books. The best part? All of us have access to it. Listen to find out what some of the implications might be for industry professionals, librarians, booksellers, and readers.

Learn about their study through the Panorama Project:

https://www.panoramaproject.org/news/2021/2/10/panorama-project-releases-immersive-media-amp-books-2020-research-report

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Welcome to the hybrid of Calgary. With

me, Emily. We're mapping the publishing frontier with stories

of publishing past, conversations with publishing

professionals of today and peeks into Publishing's future.

Today's guests are Dr Rachel Norda and Dr Kathy Inman

Behrens. Dr Rachel Norda is director of publishing and

assistant professor of English at Portland State University. Dr

Norda holds a PhD degree in publishing studies from the

University of sterling, and has published peer reviewed research

on various book publishing projects, including book

subscription boxes, independent publisher mission statements,

the Portland Book Festival and online book blurbs. She is

currently writing a book contracted with Cambridge

university press about entrepreneurship in 21st

Century, US book publishing. She has been very involved with the

industry, including analyzing data and writing industry

reports for pub West, the independent book Publishers

Association, the book industry study group, literary arts and

publishing Scotland. Dr Kathy Inman Behrens, Associate

Professor of English at Portland State University, has published

peer reviewed research about digital humanities, book

publishing and electronic literature. A PhD from UC

Berkeley. Dr Behrens conducted grant supported research for IBM

when she was faculty and a fellow of the Annenberg

Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Dr

Barron studies immersive environments and transmedia

experiences, consulting with Portland companies on VR medical

therapies, immersive storytelling and mobile web

interface design in her book, publishing, consulting and

scholarship, two years of survey work provide foundational data

for insights about consumer behavior at the Portland Book

Festival. She's on the Advisory Council for the Portland Book

Festival. Welcome doctors.

Hello,

hello. Thank you, Emily, great to be here.

Thank you so much for reaching out about your

research. I'm very excited for to hear about all of the hard

work that you've done and the fact that you have been able to

accomplish something so encompassing during a period of

time where it's really hard to breathe be productive in life.

Just as an icebreaker, how have you been staying motivated?

Ooh,

I have a I have a dog that walks very, very

slowly, and I've had to practice mindfulness in order to be his

companion as we

and we'll through the different types of weather we've

had. So I would say my super slow dog has been a technique.

I love that.

What about you, Rachel, for context, Kathy's dog is a

corgi so very short legged, which impacts the slow walking

for me.

I mean to stay motivated in terms of this

research,

working with a collaborator like Kathy is

really exciting, because we get to, you know, build off each

other and have really interesting conversations. But

kind of just in general, during covid, my coping mechanism has

been baking,

which the Barons family sing folk songs about Rachel's baked

goods. They are so superb. My husband calls her the Mozart of

baked goods. So I would say covid has been very, very good

to all of us, actually, in this regard.

Well, in the baked goods department, I think

that's been 111, area that we've all kind of explored. I have

benefited from the baked goods, because my husband is very

interested in baking and experimenting. There were three

weeks in a row where we had coffee cake every Saturday

because he couldn't get the recipe right. I'm like, I don't

know. Maybe it needs a little more this. And he's like, Okay,

I'll try that next week. And I'm like, no stop. I hate. Just

kidding. It was

all my idea. Clever, human Yes,

unabashedly, you should start a trend on

Tiktok, where you do photo. Songs about baked goods, like

sea shanty to baked good folk songs, it

would work, yeah, I think with Ukulele, yeah. Oh, my

God, I love it, yeah?

All right, um, so give me just like the short

rundown of what this what this report is about that you two

have done together well.

As listeners may be aware, there's not a lot of

publicly available data about readership in the industry. A

lot of it is behind paywalls, the data that is available, and

just we wanted to be able to produce something that could be

publicly accessible and kind of be a foundational piece for you

know, everyone to be talking about the same thing, because so

many times, even In looking at like, some of the disputes

between publishers and libraries, or, you know, some of

these different stakeholders, it's because they're not

actually using the same data to talk to each other. They all

have their own kind of proprietary data, and then make

assumptions about what that means for everybody else. So

that was a big part of it for us. And then, you know, covid

has really changed book book reading and book buying, book

borrowing. So to be able to document that during this

particularly pivotal year was also important.

Yeah, and following up with what Rachel was saying about this

year is an unusual year. We did gather data about people's

behavior before covid And then people's behavior during covid,

so that's a very interesting snapshot to have that will

become more valuable over time if we're funded to go back into

the field and gather more data using identical questions and

then maybe a couple of new ones. One of the key concepts is book

engagement, as opposed to say, book reading or book buying,

because people do lots and lots of things with books, including

give them as gifts to others. They use them because sometimes

they have already read it online, but maybe they want that

beautiful cover on their shelf. They also dip in and out of

books as reference materials. And I mean, we wouldn't say, I

mean, I wouldn't say that I've read a book if I've only looked

at a paragraph in it, and yet that maybe that was a very

important paragraph. So we really wanted to capture the

wide range of things that people do with books. So we book

engagement was the primary term that we used.

It's also a cross media study, and that was very important to

us too. So books are a main focus, but we also look at TV,

film and games. Which are, you know, adjacent industries that

really have more connection than not. Which is, you know, is what

we found. The the kinds of people that were avidly engaging

with books were also avidly engaging in these other forms.

So not thinking of them as such siloed spaces, but rather this

interconnected ecosystem of media consumption,

and you had 4300 respondents that were pre

qualified. That seems like a ridiculous number of people. I

haven't done surveys like that before, but I looked at that and

I'm like, you pre qualified everybody, and then you ask them

all these questions and like, how did you qualify them?

Good question.

Yeah, so we had particular quotas that we were filling, so

as people were signing up to take the survey online, and this

was through a research and entity, Qualtrics, with which

PSU already has a relationship with, and so they were the ones

who were bringing in the the people for the survey. But

basically we had four quotas that we were thinking about age,

region, gender and also race, ethnicity. And so those were

capped at certain points for certain demographics to be able

to match the US population. That was the idea is so that you

know, one group isn't particularly over represented

just because they ended up

taking the survey first. Okay, so just the

proportional to the US Census data

correct,

and I learned something really interesting about US census

data, which is that older people, like boomers, are. There

are more white boomers than there are white Millennials

proportionally. That In other words, you know, as we've talked

about it, 2042, I think, is the year when white people will no

longer be the racial majority in the United States. And you can

see that in the generational differences that our survey

captured. So it's really, really interesting to think about,

because white female baby boomers have been really thought

to be the best customer of the book publishing industry, but

our data found that that is not the case. Oh, yeah, okay,

Rachel, you want to jump in on that? Yeah, of course. And I

mean, I want to say that Rachel is a phenomenal researcher. She

is the very unusual humanist who also has significant social

sciences training and can crunch numbers like nobody's business.

So unicorn, I love it, yes,

yeah, millennials, and particularly black and Latinx

millennials, so a more ethnically diverse group, they

more of them were avid book engagers. So we, we we looked at

a segment which was 53% of our survey population, and these

were the respondents who engaged with the most books. It was four

plus books per month, 48 books a year. To give kind of some

context, there have been other pew studies that have found that

the average number of books that Americans read is 12. So, you

know, these are really quite avid book engagers. They're

buying as gifts, but they're also reading and borrowing from

the library, and it's really encouraging, and to be honest,

not really surprising to me that that it's so young and

ethnically diverse, but now we have data to prove that. You

know, we've been trying to say that there's been so long where

publishers are not publishing books for those markets because

they say they're not reading, or there isn't a market there, but

there is, yes, it's good news.

Shape you can just point at things. You can

tap the sign. You can throw paper in the air.

Yeah, well, I mean in the other reason to toss

confetti is that we have a very high level of confidence in

these data, we have a 98.5% confidence rate, which is a

statistical derivation that Rachel could probably explain

better than I but, but I mean with that is to say, like, like,

Where does this data come from? Like, who's funding us? Like, is

that? Is this data interested in any way. And the answer is, it

is not. This study was funded, and the money went mostly to pay

because you have to pay survey respondents. And that's what

Qualtrics does. It's part of their that's what incentivizes

people to take the surveys. And the people who funded us our

overdrive, those are the folks who do the ebooks at libraries,

the ALA, the American Library Association, the book industry

study group, the independent book publishers of America. So

we're talking about a very, you know, broad group of industry

people, and nobody had any particular ax to grind. So

that's why the good news about black and Latinx Millennials

being such avid book engagers is a really happy story that just

reflects practices,

and it's going to a lot of a lot of

organizations that actually have some level of influence. So it's

not like it's going to hide in a in a tome somewhere that no one

will read. Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm sympathizing.

Back to Rachel's observation about pay walls. I

mean, like, this is high. This is like, Grade A data that

anybody in the world can access. It is freely accessible. And,

you know, we invite everybody in book publishing and across media

to check out the study, because we also found that avid book

engagers were also avid video gamers and avid TV, TV and movie

streamers. So what I kind of am curious about is, where do these

folks find the time because they're consuming avidly. Be in

all of these media. You know, we had this fabulous person at

Portland State who emailed, emailed us with data about how

students replay, like, say, recorded classes or other media

available through Portland State, and Emily Connolly noted

that they play back at one and a half times speed, right? And

many people, I think, playback audio books faster than than a

1x rate. I see you nodding, nodding, actually, and so, but,

I mean, I'm curious about, like, I mean, sure, some of the

because, like, there's a lot of casual gaming that people do on

their mobile phones. So you can do that when you're in line

someplace. You're just killing time between things. But for

immersive media experiences, it's kind of hard to do that

while you're also doing other things. And yet, we find that

people really are doing that.

Can you put a finer point on what you mean

when you say immersive?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think typically

when we think about, when the book industry thinks about

immersive reading, they imagine somebody with a book, you know,

underneath an apple tree, you know, deeply dived into that

book and unaware of anything else going on around them. But

what our data are suggesting is that people are multitasking.

First of all, they're multitasking when they're like

70% of them are multitasking when they engage audiobooks. 61%

is that right? Are engaging. Are multitasking when they engage

ebooks. So we know that people are doing multiple things at

once. There are some forms of games that are amenable to that.

There are some forms of TV and video consumption that are

amenable to that. And so I think we want to broaden our notion,

or maybe create more nuance when we think about forms of

attention, because, for sure, immersive attention of the sort

we bring when we read a novel or a memoir or autobiography or

whatever, and you tune everything else out around you,

that's a certain kind of attention, and people find that

kind of attention really rewarding. It's why books have

been around for 500 years and will continue to be around. But

there are other forms that kind of go back to this idea of

playing audio books at one and a half speed or more, which is to

say hyper reading. And so I think it'd be kind of

interesting to do a little more digging around rates at which

people are consuming different types of media

you're your questions that you included for

people to respond to, seem very nuanced, or at least what you

were able to extrapolate from it there. There's just, like a very

interesting number of learnings that you got from them. And can

you kind of like, give a rundown on all of the different like

things you were looking for, I guess,

yeah. I mean in terms of what we were looking for,

there were two main goals for the project overall. One was

discovery. How are people discovering things so books, but

also TV, movies and games. And how does this discovery happen

across those different media forms too, not just within, but

then also, because we were working with panorama project on

this, they are particularly interested in data about

libraries, and so the other goal was to figure out, how do

libraries fit within this system, this ecosystem. So those

were the two things that that drove us. So, you know, there

were many questions about the different ways that like where

people are discovering books and how they are discovering books.

Turns out, word of mouth, of course, is very important, as we

know, but reinforced here that you know, some of the top ways

for discovering books include recommendations from friends,

recommendations from family and also favorite author. And that

genre is the most important piece in terms of book buying

factors, but then author it comes in second. So you know,

author brand and category really are quite important, and those

both come before price in people's decisions, and then

it's interesting in how people are browsing, both online, and

you know, talking about browsing. In person in

bookstores and attending in person events too, in person

author events. So for that question, we were asking, how

they usually find books. So it wasn't just during covid, and

obviously there have been some particular difficulties with

browsing in person and going to author events in person during

covid, but it's interesting to see how people still really

appreciate those methods.

Yeah, and we also found we were really surprised to find that

people are not using bookstores. Bookstores are not just a

showroom for Amazon that actually runs the opposite

direction as well, at basically roughly equal rates. So people

might discover a book on Amazon and then go grab it at their

local bookstore. I do that. Yeah, yeah. I love it. And I

mean another really interesting discrepancy was that, I think,

like recommendations from friends and family make up the

majority of ways that people hear about books, but

recommendations from algorithms was ranked very, very low, which

suggests that folks are actually probably not aware of the extent

to which algorithmic recommendation is maybe priming

them. Maybe they've seen things a few times before their pal

says, Hey, have you heard about this book x so, so I think that

people in general, I especially because we are living in kind of

dual realities and Embodied Reality, in a virtual reality, I

think people are just not as aware of how, how their time

online tacitly informs

what visible they're considered of the

market.

Adam Smith online, right?

Yeah, God, he never died. Well, you

know, there's one thing I do want to add before we move on,

which is that we did have an important screening question, so

all of the people that ended up taking our survey had to have

engaged with at least one book in the previous 12 months, which

is roughly about 75% of the population, according to a Pew

study. So people who have not touched a book or engaged with a

book, or given a book or checked out a book, none of who've done

none of those things, they were not eligible to take this

survey, so I do want to mention that screening question.

Okay, so these are the people who the the

publishers and the libraries actually care about. It wasn't

about it wasn't about drawing people in. It was about using

the population that was there already