Episode 39: Kathi Inman Berens, Ph.D. & Rachel Noorda, Ph.D. on Gen Z and Millennial Survey

According to a report released by the American Library Association, Gen Z and Millennials are visiting public libraries at higher rates than previous generations, and also prefer print books over other formats. Dr. Kathi Inman Berens and Dr. Rachel Noorda from Portland State University authored this annual survey to capture how these younger generations read and discover books. They joined the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss their findings in detail and talk about what some of the results mean for book publishers. 

The survey is titled: Gen Z and Millennials: How They Use Public Libraries and Identify Through Media Use. Results from the survey include (but are not limited to): 

• How Gen Z and millennials prefer to discover books (i.e. recommendations from friends/talent/influencers, streaming media adaptations from books, etc.)
• Percentage of Gen Z and millennials that identify as readers, gamers, fans, and writers. 
• How book advertising impacts Gen Z and millennials
• Challenges that libraries and publishers face when it comes to these generations
• Recommendations on how to reach and connect with Gen Z and millennial

Dr. Kathi Inman Berens is a U.S. Fulbright Scholar of digital culture, former Annenberg Innovation Lab Fellow, prize-winning author, and Associate Professor of Book Publishing and Digital Humanities at Portland State University. Dr. Rachel Noorda is Director of Publishing and also an Associate Professor at Portland State University. Visit the Portland State University website to learn more about Dr. Kathi Inman Berens, along with her published works, and Dr. Rachel Noorda.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 
Hello and welcome to the BookSmarts Podcast where we talk about publishing data and technologies and send you away with some insights that will help you sell more books. I’m your host, Joshua Tallent. This month on the Book Smarts Podcast, I’m excited because I get to speak to two old friends Dr. Kathi Inman Berens and Dr. Rachel Noorda. I can’t remember how far back it was that we had our first conversation. You were one of the one of the first people I interviewed, I think, on the BookSmarts Podcast, so it’s great to have you guys back. Let me give a little background so that our listenership knows who you are. So, Dr. Berens, Kathy, is a U.S. Fulbright Scholar of digital culture. Former Annenberg Innovation Lab Fellow, a prize winning author and Associate Professor of Book Publishing and Digital Humanities at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. Her latest project is about the bookish behaviors of people who identify as “non-readers”. And Dr. Rachel Norda, is Director of Publishing and Associate Professor at Portland State University also in Portland, and she researches book consumption, reading communities entrepreneurship and marketing. Thank you both for joining me today.

Kathi Behrens
So great to be with you, Joshua.

Rachel Noorda
Yeah, lovely to be here.

Joshua Tallent
I appreciate you taking some time. And you guys have done a study about Gen Z, which I think is really exciting, really interesting stuff. It’s always good to figure out what the next generation of readers is thinking and how they see the world. So tell our audience just a little bit about the study that you conducted. What was the impetus and kind of what was the overall goal?

Kathi Behrens
Well Joshua, as you know, because we came on your podcast to talk about it. We did a report called immersive media and books 2020. And that was a large, nationally representative sample of more than 4,000 participants across all age demographics and we measured their book engagement and their media consumption. We found that Gen Z and millennials were the most avid across categories so when we went back into the field in 2022. We decided to focus on that group or those two groups, and that is to say people who were ages 13 to 40. At the time of our survey, which was 2022, we surveyed more than 2,000 people and our proportions were pinned to the U.S. Census and so we have representation for, you know, age, gender, region, race and ethnicity. So we found some really cool things about Gen Z, and millennials. And in fact, it bore out our original findings that they were quite avid. We added in questions about identity, which we’ll be talking about further today. So talking about how people read today, we captured a broad range of reading behaviors. So more than just books, more than just even websites, or magazines. We also captured text messages, emails, chats, in game streams. You know, we captured a wide variety of behaviors, you know, single pane webtoon type comics. So we really wanted to capture the kinds of behaviors people were doing. We found that 92% of our survey participants, checked social media daily and 25% check multiple times per hour. This is consistent with recent Pew studies about online use. But we were surprised to find that 54% of Gen Z’s and millennials are visiting libraries, that printed books are Gen Z’s number one preferred format and so even though these people are very, very digitally active, and consistently online, they’re also engaging with analog media and they’re enjoying and seeking out live and embodied experiences. So libraries are places where we observed young people moving seamlessly between engagement on their phones, and then engagement with other people in library settings. And you know, throughout our conversation today, we’ll be talking about how people are digitally dual. They’re engaging both in person and online at pretty much the same time so this might be the hallmark of Gen Z and millennials media use is that their media omnivorous and context agnostic. They’ll find a story that they like in one setting and pursue it across media. So think of the Bridgerton example. After the popular Netflix series, sales of printed Bridgerton books shot up 3,000%. And even more surprising, ebook sales leapt 8,000%. So crossmedia discovery is really a key way that Gen Z and millennials find Books.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s pretty impressive. So Rachel, how do Gen Z and millennials prefer to discover books?

Rachel Noorda
Yeah, I’m glad that we get to talk about book discovery again because that was really at the heart of our last discussion on this podcast a few years ago. And when we were talking about it before, it was, of course, across age groups. So I’d like to point out some of the things that are unique about Gen Z and millennials with discovery and some of how they’re very comparable with what we found previously. You know, one of the things we discussed is that there isn’t one formula for book discovery, because consumers engage so many touchpoints and kinds of media when they discover new books. And this is also true for Gen Z and millennials in our 2022 data. So the top way that Gen Z and millennials prefer to discover books is through recommendations from friends but even that is only 25%. So a fourth. The second preferred method of book discovery is streaming TV and movies that are adapted from books. So that’s that importance of cross media as Kathi was talking about, but maybe the most interesting thing about Gen Z and Millennial discovery, which is different from other age groups, is that they rely on and really trust sources from social media. So for example, the number three preferred discovery method was recommendations from talent and this includes authors, of course, but also gamers, illustrators, and other creators like that. The number four preferred method of discovery was recommendations from influencers. So recommendations from friends are prominent, of course, much like they were across ages because of that close connection between people, the trust there for recommendations that they know you enough to recommend a book. But there’s actually a similar trust for Gen Z and millennials with creators and influencers that they feel they have a relationship with from social media, you know, on their top platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Tik Tok.

Joshua Tallent
That makes sense. Yeah. Discovery is always a question for publishers, right? Trying to figure out where do I put my money into advertising? Where do I put my efforts in getting my book in front of people, so it’s good to know that some of the things that publishers have been thinking about for a long time are still the case with the younger generations. But it is also really interesting to me to see the recommendations from talent and the influencers are kind of little further down the list than we might expect, if we just listened to people out there. So that’s interesting. So Kathi, talk to us about the different media identities that Gen Z and millennials have, how do they identify themselves? And how does that change how we think about selling books?

Kathi Behrens
Well, Joshua, we already knew going into this research, as we’ve been talking about, that readers are media omnivores, not just reading, but also gaming, writing, podcasting, and so forth. So they’re both consuming media and making media. And crossmedia, as we’ve talked about is really important to media discovery. The top media identities are number one, as readers with 57%. 53% identify as gamers, and 52% identify as fans. It’s worth noting that it’s not a zero sum game. It’s not that if someone’s a reader, they’re not a gamer. In fact, we did find overlap between these communities. And we also found that 25% of Gen Z’s and millennials identify as writers. So what’s really interesting about this is that it’s about finding community and support for these kinds of identities. It’s not just about consumption. But as people are also making things as with writing, they’re getting reinforcement for identity around books, around reading, and so forth. But it actually is also about more than even media identity. Gen Z, in particular, is very values based. We know that values-based marketing really appeals to them. We can see that right now in the context of company boycotts in response to perceive profiteering from the Israel Hamas war so we do know that talking to Gen Z and millennials authentically in the spaces where they live online is going to be a great way for publishers to connect with those communities, but they do need to be seen as participating and contributing authentically and not just kind of exploiting the fact that a bunch of people are all in one place at the same time.

Joshua Tallent
That’s interesting. Was there any overlap between the millennials and Gen Z that identify as writers and those that identify as readers? Was that a larger percentage overlap than gamers?

Kathi Behrens
Yeah, that was. I’d have to dig back into the report to find the specific numbers. I don’t know. Rachel, do you happen to have the numbers at top of mind? We do know that there’s a strong correlation.

Rachel Noorda
Yeah, I do know that lf those that identify as readers, there’s a much larger portion that are writers within there than the general population. Yeah, yeah, we can dig into that.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, it’s interesting to me. I’m curious a little bit about how publishers can engage in that aspect of the reading community, the reading population. 25% is pretty high. You think about writing as an activity, but not just as an activity as an identity for a person. I write, this is what I love to do. That’s an interesting kind of perspective to think and as you’re thinking of marketing, or reaching out to readers, also think about the ones in that population that are also avid writers, and where are they writing? And how do they write and what did they write about? And how does that help a publisher who’s trying to reach that population more effectively?

Kathi Behrens
Well, we might also want to think about the role of literary festivals, because literary festivals are both places where fans can discover new to them, you know, writers and books. But often, they also often offer writing seminars and pop up writing coaching. So there’s some support around a bunch of people coming into a big festival for one day. Here in Portland, we have the Portland Book Festival run by the Literary Arts Organization. And the seamless way you can move between being a fan who’s going to hear a reading or hear a panel discussion, standing in line with your book, getting that one on one time with the author where they inscribe your name, and then actually going out and doing some writing yourself in that same day. I think those kinds of opportunities are really robust for publishers to tap into those superfans, you know, those people who are not just reading, but they’re looking for hidden gems. That’s why they’re going to the Literary Festival, and then they’re producing their own work.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s really good. So Rachel, you found fairly surprisingly, that people who don’t identify as readers are still going to libraries. So why do you think that is?

Rachel Noorda
Yeah, I think the answer to that is twofold. One is, we don’t always think about it but libraries offer resources and services well beyond books. So Gen Z and millennials can go there to create their own content as we were just talking about with, you know, lots of libraries have writing workshops, and spaces for that kind of content, but also for creating music and doing crafts together. We did some ethnographic research with teens in libraries in Ohio, and just found they were playing, you know, video games together, they were chilling with friends, some of them brought their children. Remember that, you know, millennials are definitely in that age where they often have young children. Their skills training as they’re going into the workforce. So there’s just a lot available at the library. So there’s that piece, but I don’t think that alone can account for this number. So the second piece is related to some further research that we’re doing about the connection between identity and behavior. We found that the media identity of reader is not available to everyone and it’s really more about community than it is about behaviors so, in other words, as we were looking at the folks who don’t identify as readers, they actually weren’t reading less. They were still reading, but for some reason, they don’t feel they can claim the identity as reader. It wasn’t valuable to them or their community, or there were other barriers, you know, socio economic, racial, gender. So just because people are going to the library and not identifying as readers, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t reading, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t engaging with books at the library. It’s this difference between the community piece, which really seems central to identity,that you identify as a reader so you can connect with other readers and talk about that. So we know that identity and behavior are connected, but they’re not synonymous.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. And that also, again, makes a big influence on how a publisher or marketing person might think about reaching those communities. You know, not everybody that says they’re not a reader is really not a reader and there’s ways to reach those populations. I think that’s a big question is how does book advertising impact Gen Z and millennials? Kathi, any thoughts on that?

Kathi Behrens
Yeah, I mean, before we talk about specific numbers around advertising, and how many people bought a book from an ad, we can also just think about the data around what have you read in the last 12 months? So we asked that question. 94% said text messages, 90% said email, 88% said social media, 50% said printed books, 46% said chats in games, and 28% said ebooks. So the heterogeneity of how people are finding things is really important for publishers to think about. So not just the content, but the ways in which people are reading strikes me as important to think about. There’s also been a huge growth in mobile-only content. Think about WebToon, which is the fastest growing reading platform in the world. Gen Z and millennials subscribe to a lot of mobile-only content. As just two examples, 63% of our population paid for access to WebToon. Now remember, WebToon is free to access. When you pay for it, you unlock content faster. So that’s just a thing for publishers to think about. 86% of our population paid for Substack and there’s a big correlation between people who are producing newsletters on Substack and who are authoring books, so 86% of people are paying for that content. This seems important to me for publishers to think about. We know that our population are on sites like YouTube, Tiktok, and Instagram. Talent and influencers hold sway with them. 32% of our population get book recommendations from talent, like authors or live streamers, 28% get book recommendations from influencers. And remember that influencers, it’s a very intimate format. There are multiple touch points per day often, and the intimacy of engaging with this content on one’s phone, you know, you can be anywhere with this content. And so the way for publishers to think about that is they need to walk a fine line between seeming to participate in those conversations authentically and doing something called astroturfing-a term that came out about 10 years ago around the concept of spreadable media. Astroturfing is faking grassroots participation, so you don’t want to be an astroturfer. You want to be the real deal. You want to engage with people at every single point on that loyalty loop because we know that people continue talking about book products after they purchase them. So point of sale, that whole conversation goes on way beyond points of sal and what Rachel was saying about community identity and reading, is that the more people feel like they’re a part of a community, and that there’s support for their reading identity and their writerly identity, the more likely publishers are to connect with those audiences.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that makes sense. And that concept of being authentic has come up before in some other conversations that I’ve had, and it makes a lot of sense, you know? There’s been a lot of astroturfing. There’s been a lot of kind of fakeness on the internet in general so it’s encouraging in some ways to see, you know, people who have been living on the internet their entire lives, thinking, “Okay, I know the difference between someone who’s authentic and someone who isn’t” and making a differentiation in their mind as to whether that’s effective for them on an advertising level. That’s really cool.

Kathi Behrens
And publishers might want to think about that around Own Voices publishing as well, understanding that Gen Z and millennials are the most racially diverse generations in this country. Like the younger the generation, the more racially diverse it is. If you want to tap into those dollars, and we know from our data that black and LatinX Gen Z and millennials are the most avid, if you want to tap into those communities authentically, you should probably have authors who are writing from that perspective to those communities.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, it makes sense. So Rachel, Gen Z and millennials have been called the most impatient generations. How does that affect and how does it come through in the data that you guys have found and what does it mean for publishers?

Rachel Noorda
Yeah, so I’m a millennial myself. So I sometimes do take umbrage with the idea that Gen Z and millennials are more impatient than other generations, but that is certainly has been floating around and there are some aspects of our data that confirm that younger people are really used to immediate and they don’t have a lot of patience for waiting around for content. So whether that’s, you know, waiting for a package from Amazon, waiting for an ebook through the library. We found, for example, that 75% of Gen Z and Millennial library patrons said that a wait time of one week or less was long. A week or less! And approximately 1/5 of them were deterred by these long, you know, in quotes, “wait times”, so much so that they would go elsewhere to get the book. Gen Z, millennials are also very used to subscriptions and that’s an all you can eat buffet of media content. You have immediate access to it. We captured some data about the kinds of bookish subscriptions that they subscribe to. Audible was the top one. About one third of them reported subscribing to Audible, followed by Kindle Unlimited at around 25%, but then the next one was Crunchyroll which is a manga and anime subscription. After that, the serial fiction and fanfiction subscriptions like Wattpad and radish, so it’s kind of interesting to see the different content that they’re subscribing to…audiobooks, ebooks, web, comics, manga, fanfiction, et cetera. Finally, one piece of this impatience maybe comes through because we’re in this always-engaged digital culture. Gen Z and millennials are on their phones and social media a lot. Kathi already talked about, you know, 25% of them are checking social media multiple times an hour. They’re constantly scrolling and being fed, and sometimes bombarded, with content. So in this scenario, in this environment, is it really any surprise that there might be a slight impatience problem?

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that makes sense. And I remember growing up, you know, if you put a book request in, it could be three months before you get access to that book. So one week is definitely a an improvement but at the same time, it’s hard when you’re used to getting things very quickly and having access to what you want almost at a moment’s notice. That is, I guess, a little different.

Rachel Noorda
Absolutely.

Kathi Behrens
And I would add, Joshua, that it is an opportunity for publishers to train Gen Z and millennials to seek out content from legitimate sources, as opposed to piracy. So, you know, supporting libraries is a way of training people to get access paid for content.

Rachel Noorda
Yeah. Piracy, you know, isn’t always about because you’re trying to get something for free. But because that’s the, like, fastest and easiest way to get the content.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, and sometimes the only way to get the content as well. We see this with media TV all the time where there’s certain things you just can’t get access to, for whatever reason. It’s a misunderstood part of the media landscape, I think. But it is a really well, well made point, Kathi, that helping potential consumers access content, or potential readers access content more effectively, is obviously really important. So what are your suggestions for publishers who want to reach Gen Z. They want to make sure that content is available, but they also want to make sure that their books are being seen by people in these generations.

Kathi Behrens
Yeah, I mean, for market discovery, tapping into existing media based communities, such as gaming communities, might be a really nice place to do some market discovery. I think that publishers have really thought a lot about BookTok and Bookstagram and have marketed effectively in those contexts. They might want to consider reaching out to some kinds of gaming communities. The myth about gamers as being, you know, young, white men, working with really elaborate controls and dedicating, you know, dozens of hours a week, that’s a very tiny percentage of the population. In fact, women game a lot. There’s something called casual gaming, in which casual video games just kind of fit into your ordinary life, that you don’t pivot your life around gaming. So I would actually encourage publishers to think a little bit about gaming communities because we know that people who are gamers are also often readers and they can be approached in those contexts. So think a little bit about gaming is tip number one. Tip number two is to reconsider the role of public libraries in your marketing campaigns. Because we know that people who don’t identify as readers are coming are still going to libraries. They’re still buying books, they’re still reading books. And that public libraries are showrooms for printed books. There are trained professionals there to help that publishers don’t have to pay to help readers connect with the books that they want. So finding some allship in this existing resource, which is scattered all around this country, really, I think would be a smart move for publishers to think about. And tip number three, ride the wave of media juggernauts happening in media outside of books. So we’ve talked about how cross media discovery is the number two way that Gen Z and millennials discover books. Right now is one example. The Emmys are getting a lot of attention so I would be asking what book products tie in with those shows being honored or talked about. There’s all kinds of media happening all around us and I think that addressing people as if, like, making the assumption that younger readers and book buyers are there across media means widening your aperture for how you think about approaching them, and what counts as relevant.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, and as we heard earlier, remember that they’re all readers even though they may not think of themselves as readers, and so you have to, you have to approach them from all the different angles in order to get their attention and help them feel like they’re gonna get something valuable out of the content you’re providing. This kind of falls into the same thing. I’ve been saying for a long time that publishers are not just book publishers. Publishers are content creators or content aggregators. They’re content makers in a way that no one else is. There’s a lot of effort that’s being done on trying to understand how do books get sold as movies or as TV shows, and there was a really good article in the hot sheet, just this past week, about that and I think it’s really important for us to remember that, you know, how publishers publish, what publishers publish, the voices they’re giving rise to, are the ones that are being seen in other media as well, because they’re seen as the the tastemakers in a sense, in the content world. So it’s really helpful, I think, to think about that aspect of this, as well, to remember that as publishers, and as those of us in the publishing industry, whether we’re publishers or not, we have an impact on the rest of the world. We have an impact on how people see what they see, and and how they engage with what they see. So I think it’s really helpful to have this detail about that younger generation to know kind of what they’re thinking as well.

Kathi Behrens
And, you know, Joshua, adding to that, I would say, printed books are the only media that Gen Z and millennials are seeking out in analog form. Everything else is digital. Which is to say that through our delivery systems, they’re also very interruptible. It’s very easy to become a media snacker, just going from one thing to the next. I think that the reason why Gen Z, in particular, are reading printed books is that it’s a digital detox. It’s an oasis from all that. So lean in, like, give, understand that in an environment of media abundance, books are an oasis. And to have that point of view really will help publishers understand their unique value in this media ecosystem.

Joshua Tallent
Definitely. Well, thank you both very much for joining me, I really appreciate the conversation and the interesting studies that you guys do. I hope to bring you on the next time when you release your next report. I always love having you on to talk about these things. So we’re gonna provide a link to the report itself in the show notes, and then the transcript. But where can our listeners follow the work that you guys are doing online?

Rachel Noorda
So we’ve been doing some work with the American Library Association. The report that we’ve been talking about today comes from there, so you can follow their press releases on ala.org. There’s another report that we haven’t talked about today, but that might be of use to publishers, about the Digital Library ecosystem and we talk about all the different stakeholders and some of the big challenges as part of that ecosystem. So yeah, go ahead and check that out.

Kathi Behrens
Yeah, and our work has been appearing in the conversation so then it’s also been picked up by Fast Company and the New York Post and many other places. We both have faculty webpages (view Kathi’s page and Rachel’s page), where you can find. We’ll give the links to Joshua so that they’re accessible but you can see the full range of the things we talk about. We’ve published about many other things in addition to the work that we’ve talked about today so there’s a wide range of content available for free on those faculty webpages at Portland State University. That’s

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. Thank you both Kathy and Rachel. I really appreciate you coming on the show and we look forward to having you back again soon.

Kathi Behrens
It’s obviously a huge pleasure, Joshua.

Joshua Tallent
That’s it for this episode of the book smarts podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, we’d really appreciate it if you review the podcast and give us five stars on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen. And we really appreciate you sharing this with your colleagues and friends in the industry who might be interested in hearing more about publishing and technology and the things we talked about here. Thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.