Harry Potter Strikes a Blow Against the Digital Divide

At a conference last week, during the obligatory conversation on digital first, one participant, a father, as you will see, proudly stated: 

“My kids are digital natives…they don’t know what books are.” 

Frankly, to me that is heinous Digibabble and, while it makes me wince, it also makes me sad. 

In a world where digital is everything, I find it absurd that some think being “digitally savvy” is still a badge of honor. And as my readers know I find it even more absurd that there are those who feel obliged to establish their own digital creds with a wholesale obsolescence of anything they perceive as not being digital enough….whatever that means. 

Luckily, our kids are smarter than us. They know that while digital is everything, not everything is digital. So, it is not surprising that the children of the world are driving a renaissance of the printed page. 

Fact: There has been a surge in printed book sales over the past few years,. A recent article in Publisher’s Weekly cites statistics from all over the world, and finds that everywhere — from the US to the UK, from Brazil to China — children’s printed books are the fast-growth part of the book business, often in double digits. 

In the world where digital is everything, but not everything is digital, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that digital technology is surely intrinsic to the ability and affordability to produce the children’s books that are powering this growth today. Printed books are more beautiful than ever. There are gorgeous illustrations and rich typography; books that pop-up and unfold and wow the senses in wonderfully visual and tactile ways. And, of course, none of this would be happening were it not for the beautifully written, great stories that continue to find their audience today. 

As technology settles into our way of living (yes again, digital is everything but not everything is digital), people know when to pick up their tablets and when to pick up a book…not unlike our ancestors who settled into radio and print and then TV, radio and print…we have it easy… 

So let’s get with the times…..Josh Catone said when he was Executive Director of Editorial Projects at Mashable, “Ebooks are not simply a better format replacing an inferior one; they offer a wholly different experience.”

And as we have learned from the Waldorf schools, there is value in making sure that our children have offline real life experiences as do, it would seem, the children of the real digital elite… 

What’s more, according to a story in The Guardian last year, there may be clear benefits to reading printed books. Turns out that in a study where 50 readers were given a short story by Elizabeth George to read, the 25 who read it on Kindle had significantly more difficulty recalling the chronology of the plot. One of the researchers, Anne Mangen of Stavanger University in Norway noted that “paper readers did report higher on measures having to do with empathy and transportation and immersion, and narrative coherence, than iPad readers.”

Just this week, the Financial Times, offered up more evidence about the magic of printed books. While Bloombsbury’s sales of adult books fell 10.4 percent last year, the sales of Harry Potter books rose 29 percent, due to a reissue of the series with new illustrated covers. Now that’s fantastic wizardry.

The truth is, however, that there is no need to draw battle-lines. There is ample room in our lives for both ebooks and printed books and, if not, there should be.

Our kids are smarter here, too. We should be thankful that our kids not only jump from screen to screen and device to device seamlessly, from analog to digital and back just as fluidly and without the self-consciousness that sometimes inhibits us older folks. In fact, they don’t see a divide, only lots of good choices.

As marketers, we are faced daily with these kinds of choices, too, and have to wade through so much Digibabble. Whether it’s choice of channel, screen, device, online or offline, it is up to us to really understand the role of each and, at a higher level, plan for the role of each.

 We lose when we adopt a knee-jerk digital-only stance, a meaningless concept by any measure. There is room for live football and online gaming tournaments. Concerts fill up stadiums despite the prevalence of video content. People love Netflix but they are also still flocking to movie theaters. And Warby Parker and Bonobos opened real stores while Amazon hired Woody Allen…..

The kids get it. Maybe we should take a page out of their book.