I saw this story about how a publisher is using nonfiction to appeal to the hard-to-capture boys market on NECN (New England Cable News) this morning, and thought it was pretty interesting. The video is 4:25 long (there was no code for me to embed it here), and worth a watch.
It’s curious to me how the story used being bored with video games as an angle for drawing boys into nonfiction books, and it made the astute point that not all boys are Harry Potter fans. Do boys really get bored with video games? Really? Perhaps gaming isn’t the only way to get boys to read, or get them into the library?
Has your library had success with promoting nonfiction to encourage boys to read? Are there any lines of books you can recommend that can hook this elusive audience?
There are 2 Comments to "Boston publisher appeals to boys with nonfiction"
What I took from this piece is the concept of not having to “promote” non-fiction to boys, but to have a reasonably equal collection of fiction and non-fiction materials. Librarians need to be as familiar with non-fiction titles as fiction. This is obviously in part a gender issue — far more female librarians knowing literature that appealed/appeals to them. And yes, that is a generalization, but I believe it is also the unspoken elephant in the room.
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