Middle Grade Readers - A survey of what books they like and the impact of ereaders

Middle grade writers spend a lot of time thinking and talking about what kids like to read, so I thought I would take the opportunity to ask some children themselves. I did a survey of 47 children in the 4th through 6th grades about what types of books they liked to read, and also about ebooks. Some of the results surprised me.

First, some facts about this group: The children attend a small private Montessori school, so there are only about 50 total students in the 4th-6th grades at this school. While these kids are a very small, privileged piece of the demographic pie, they are interesting, because they’ve had access to a variety of books their whole lives, and they have parents who have the funds and the resources to either take them to the library or buy them books, even hardcover new releases. They are aware of the choices of books out there. Not all of them like to read, as is typical with any group of students.  In fact, one boy who took the survey crossed out all the choices, I think as his way of indicating he really doesn’t like to read.

 

The survey they filled out did not ask for names, because I didn’t want them to feel they had to choose accepted or more popular types of books if they didn’t want to. It asked for their ages and whether they were a boy or a girl, and then asked them to choose their top three favorite types of books to read. I gave them the choices below and also told them examples of each category to make sure they understood. Not all of the children picked three; some picked more and some picked less.

Here were the choices:

Books set in imaginary places, fantasies

Science fiction, books set in the future or on different planets or spaceships

Mysteries

Books set in schools or in towns with kids like you

Books about animals

Books about adventures in faraway places or wilderness adventures

Books about sports

Books set back in time (historical)

Books set in today’s time, but with characters who have special powers or who are fantasy beings

Books with magic in them

Here are the results broken down by sex (I'll try to edit the post to get the choices more readable, but it's going to take me a bit of time to figure out how to do that):

I was particularly surprised by the results of the boys. It was interesting to see mysteries as the top choice and historicals right up there with several other choices. I also wouldn’t have guessed that scary stories would score as highly with the girls.

There are also two factors about this group that might influence the results. One is that while many of these children participate in sports outside of school, there are no organized sports at school, and that may be why interest in books about sports is low.  Two, all the children know me and know my adventure books. My daughter pushed my first book, WILDFIRE RUN, to many of them, particularly the girls, so that may be why that category scored higher than it would in a school where one particular book wasn’t promoted so much.

The most fascinating part of the survey was about ebooks. I showed the children a Kindle and a Nook  and talked about the IPad to make sure they understood what an ereader was.  Silly me. I should have realized children this age are fascinated by technology and far more up-to-date than I am. When I asked how many had read a whole book on an ereader, twenty-seven said they had.  That’s 57%. Seven children even had ereaders of their own. This is at a school where very few children have cellphones, and where the parents of many of these kids don’t allow them to play video games or don’t encourage them to do so. I also asked of those who hadn't read a book on an ereader, how many thought they might want to try one. Thirteen of twenty said they would. That's kind of a trick question though. Most kids won't turn down a chance to try a new gadget.

I’m going to be talking to many more children in about a month from a different sort of school and will ask them to fill out the same survey. More results to follow!

~ Dee Garretson

Call Me Old-Fashioned...

I recently saw my very first D-box movie. I didn’t even know what D-box was until a couple of weeks ago, so for those of you as un-D-box savvy as me, it’s motion-enhanced movie theater chairs that move along with the action on the screen. So when Harry, Ron, and Hermione went zipping along in the mining cars beneath Gringotts, it felt like we were riding the rails along with them. And that plunge that Harry and Voldemort take off the heights of Hogwarts in the last minutes of the movie—well, I felt a bit like I was going to tip out of my theater chair, lol.

D-box is not quite as intense as those movie-type rides at Disneyland or amusement parks—yet—but I don’t think I could sit through two hours of my theater chair moving quite that forcefully, anyway. Besides, it would make eating popcorn a bit hard. Still, the combination of digital 3D and a motion-enhanced chair made for a pretty high-tech movie-going experience. And I have to admit, it was fun. But would I go out of my way to see movies in D-box on a regular basis—and pay the steep price for the tickets? Probably not. Let’s face it—a good movie is a good movie even without all these added bells and whistles. I have many friends, in fact, who refuse to see movies in 3D because they feel it’s distracting and unnecessary and actually takes away from the movie experience.

This makes me think about a conversation I recently had with a manager of a bookstore about the future of books now that they’ve entered the electronic realm. He predicted we would see ebooks becoming more and more high-tech and interactive. For example, instead of a simple illustration of a door on the screen, the reader would be able to actually open the door with a touch, revealing what was on the other side. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against ebooks. But I think I can do without such frivolities as interactive illustrations. To me, there’s something about this that depersonalizes the experience. Wouldn’t a young reader—or any reader for that matter—be better served imagining a dragon soaring across the sky rather than dragging a graphic of a wing-flapping dragon across their ereader screen?

There’s a possibility, too, that we’ll see ebooks become more gamey, e.g. you’ll have to solve a puzzle or win a game in order to move on to the next chapter, etc. Now this idea really makes my heart ache. I hate the thought of books being reduced to a form of video game. No thank you. It’s not a game—it’s a book!

Personally, I think books should be about words and stories, not interactive graphics and games. It’s not for me—and I definitely think it would detract from the reading experience.

I guess I’m kind of old school about such things. What do you think about books going high-tech?

-Dawn Lairamore


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