Parents Love buying Printed Books for Their Children

Submitted by: The Two Sides Team October 3, 2014

Parents who buy books for their children have an attachment to print vs. e-books, a new Nielsen study has found.

By Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY

"While technology continues to shift the way we interact with content generally, parents still attach a high level of importance to print — in some cases they even report a higher level of attachment to print than their actual buying indicates," according to Nielsen.

"For reasons that are not entirely clear, there is a distinct bias toward print when parents are self-reporting," the study says. "We believe this may be because they visualize 'a book' as being a print book when we ask, or because of subtle biases relating to their own self-view of themselves as quality parents."

The company, which researches and provides information about consumers including TV ratings, will host the Nielsen Children's Book Summit on Dec. 12 in New York. It will provide an overview of the children's book landscape, exploring how children are reading as well as how they interact with other media, such as music, video and gaming.

In advance of the summit Nielsen released several insights to USA TODAY from a report about early readers, teens and young adults.

Perhaps not a surprise given the success of young adult series at at the box office and on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, the study also found that teens tend to favor books by authors they've previously read and books that are tied to movies. It also noted that teens' reading is influenced by their peers.

"Teens are heavily influenced by what their peers are reading and what they've read before," the study says. "There is a huge bandwagon effect around series. But the biggest single source of influence is that they've enjoyed an author's previous books."

The rest of the report will be presented at the summit in December.

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