Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Tip of the Day: publishing continues to change, most recently with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt filing bankruptcy yesterday. Hopefully they can get all their finances restructured and continue to put out great books!

Last week Tina held an Ask A2A day and one of the questions for us working in a library is what books are most popular among teens. Deena is the expert on this and I'm sure she'll share her experiences tomorrow. I don't work in YA much, so I was actually curious about this question myself. So I decided to do a bit of investigating and pulled a report for the most popular books checked out in the YA department for the last three months.

By far the most popular ones were Manga, followed by anything with a movie tie-in. Not extremely surprised. But if you are curious, here are the top five books checked out at my midwest library.




5.) My Girlfriend's a Geek
4.) Catching Fire
3.) Marmalade Boy
2.) The Hunger Games
1.) Hikaru No Go

A bit more surprisingly were the most popular subjects checked out: high school students--comic books; survival; best friends--fiction; vampires--fiction (does a big sigh--hoping this phase is over soon); dating (social customs); insurgency--juvenile fiction (hmm...); spies--juvenile fiction; wizards--comic books; X-men; Spiderman; orphans

Just curious if this surprises anyone? Now, I do think a lot of what people read reflects what is available at the time. So I'm not sure this is exactly what people are asking for or not.

--Emily, Miss Querylicious

3 comments:

Kate Fall said...

My daughter hasn't jumped on the manga bandwagon, although I'll have to show this to her. She loves horror. She'd do the vampires if they're actually scary vampires.

Her: Why do you make so many bad things happen to people in your books? Why can't they just be happy?
Me: Don't bad things happen to the characters in your favorite books?
Her: Oh yeah. Lots of people die.
Me: So there you go.
Her: Have you seen Saw yet?
Me: ... Ew.

Emily Marshall said...

what a cute exchange Kate! I think I would have been way too afraid to read horror books at her age (wait, I'm still to scared :))

Jennifer R. Hubbard said...

I'm the one who asked the question, so thanks!

Interesting mix of realistic (best friends, dating), adventurous (survival, spies), and the larger-than-life (vampires, wizards, Spiderman).