ContentDirector: Read Any Good Books Lately?

Ever since I was a member of the Book Industry Study Group Marketing and Statistics Committees in the late 1990s until 2002, I have wanted to launch a qualitative study of reading habits. It is therefore my great pleasure to kick off our Book Business "Read Any Good Books Lately?" campaign, our study of reading habits. As your source for cutting-edge industry news and strategic analysis that supports the way you do business, our ongoing goal is to keep our readers in touch with the information and the trends you need to achieve your business outcomes. As such, we want, in a sense, to help you invent the future Swiffer® of the book business, by helping you understand how people read books.

Stage one of "Read Any Good Books Lately?" is an on-the-street video campaign. We'll be collecting short videos of random readers, interviews of people we find wherever we go who are reading in public, asking them about their literary selections and their attitudes about reading. Once we are able to secure funding, we'll follow up with focus groups. We hope to work with an institutional partner and to apply tried-and-true consumer goods research methods to our study of the business of books.

We'll post our videos online and keep you up-to-date on our progress at bookbusinessmag.com and through our daily email newsletter, Publishing Business Today. We welcome your participation in this study in ways large and small, so write me with ideas at lrosen@napco.com.

Oh, and if you were wondering, I never made it through "A Brief History of Time." However, one book I did read and wholeheartedly recommend is Dennis Overbye's "Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos."

Have you read any good books lately?