Immersive Media and Books 2020: New Insights About Book Pirates, Libraries and Discovery, Millennials, and Cross-Media Engagement: Before and During COVID

Abstract

Books exist within a connected media ecosystem, but few consumer behavior and experience studies capture the relationships between books and other media forms. In Immersive Media & Books 2020, Drs. Rachel Noorda and Kathi Inman Berens from Portland State University explore crossmedia consumer behavior for books, video games, and TV/movies-capturing behaviors both before and during COVID-19. The highlights of the report are highly distributed word-of-mouth discovery, the importance of author brand and genre, avid book engagement of Black and Latinx millennials, context-agnostic book discovery, cross-media engagement and discovery , multidimensional identities and behaviors of book pirates, multitasking as a feature of contemporary book consumption, and libraries as tools of discovery.