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> Indeed, several people I spoke to mentioned that middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has

> Indeed, several people I spoke to mentioned that middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has any idea how to make a book a bestseller other than to hope it blows up on TikTok. “BookTok is imperfect,” said Karen Jensen, a youth librarian and a blogger for School Library Journal, “but in teen publishing it’s generating huge bestsellers, bringing back things from the backlist. There’s not anything like that right now for the middle-grade age group.” This part of the article is very off-putting to me. You don’t need TikTok to find good books for kids. Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject.

tivert 3y ago
> This part of the article is very off-putting to me. You don’t need TikTok to find good books for kids. Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. They need a library stocked with "books that kids will enjoy," recently published doesn't have anything to do with it. It's not like filling the school library up with stuff only published in the last 3 years is what we need to get kids reading. > The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject. I doubt that's the root cause. Frankly, all the other things seem more significant: making reading education more test-focused and less fun, screens (in a zillion different ways, subtle and obvious), the pandemic breaking peer-influenced reading, etc. They're all probably working together dis-synergisticly. I also wonder if there's other missing social components. I remember in elementary school feeling that reading "chapter books" was important step to being more mature. Do kids still feel that way? Of course I also often read pulpy junk that was fun or interesting, not serious. The OP said: > Connor was more blunt: “Maybe you think a book about a school shooting is really important,” she said, “but kids want to read a fun book. That’s what kids want today—they want to have fun.” I think that's always been true. IIRC, I always disliked the "important" books I was forced to read for school (e.g. the ones that tended to win important awards from adults and get articles written about them in the New York Times to this day).
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  > It's not like filling the school library up with stuff only published in the last 3 years is what we need to get kids reading. I’ve heard newer English literature evangelized quite a lot since older English literature gets more and more Eurocentric the further back you go. Usually on political grounds, but also with the claim that newer literature is better and more relevant to especially diverse children’s lives.
- joe-collins 3y ago
  Recent can be a generous time period, but it's not unimportant. When I was very young, I was able to enjoy the Hardy Boys and the Chronicles of Narnia, but even in the 90s, just forty years after the latter was written, they both felt very, very old. When I started finding more current writing, like Redwall or Animorphs, I never looked back.
majormajor 3y ago
> This part of the article is very off-putting to me. You don’t need TikTok to find good books for kids. Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. > The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject. You also need "evangelism" from people in a position to influence. That's unlikely to be librarians; and parents/teachers are also not the best-positioned for that. Overall the costs of social media likely still outweigh the harms here, but it seems to me like they've identified a legimitate "good" usage in encouraging reading in certain niches. How to replicate that without social media? Gotta make a bunch of local kid "influencers."
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - quirk 3y ago
    I'd like to propose an update to Godwin's law; call it NPC's Law or maybe just Trump's Law if we're being literal: "As an online discussion of a problem grows longer, the probability of assigning blame to Donald Trump approaches 1."
    - klyrs 3y ago
      Not sure it's worth engaging with such toxic commentary regardless of political affiliation.
      - sonicanatidae 3y ago
        Shall we wait for the factual rebuttal or just assume this offhand dismissal is all of it? I have yet to hear a word about the content being inaccurate, just people like you, that didn't like the presentation. My apologies for not refraining from charged words when my country is being stolen out from under me, by some of the worst people in the world, that keep getting elected by the "fuck your feelings" crowd. Also, it's germane to this topic. You, however, remain above it all, so enjoy your pedestal.
keiferski 3y ago
I think you dramatically underestimate the influence that TikTok has on young people. If you want something to be popular amongst young people, making it popular on TikTok is a huge way to do so. Libraries already have thousands, if not millions, of books on hand. I don't think it's a funding issue.
- bshacklett 3y ago
  There’s a lot more cost involved in running a library than buying books. Staff and building upkeep are big expenses. That said, you want to have some newer books coming in, too, if you want to keep kids interested.
tigen 3y ago
The defunding thing sounds like a bit of obligatory politics. "In some states, teachers can’t even keep a classroom library because they have to protect themselves from book bans" Yeah this sounds false.
- SpaceManNabs 3y ago
  > Yeah this sounds false. I have quite a few teacher friends in Georgia and NYC, and I can tell you that this is the case for them. Organizations that represent teachers have said so themselves. Hard evidence is best though. Do you have numbers to dismiss their claims?
  - tigen 3y ago
    What is the case, they literally are not allowed to have (any) books in the classroom? Can you be specific as to the mechanism here? Do you yourself have any link to any evidence? You (the article) are making the claim.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      I think the argument is quite subtle. There is a lot of book banning occurring and the rate seems to be increasing fast (see links below). There are penalties in some jurisdictions and zero teachers want to face the kind of shit that has gone on with parents and politicians, churches and local body meetings. So rather than search out each book they have and keep track of its status, then recheck a few weeks later, just remove the lot. Teachers do not have time for this crap, and why risk their jobs? It’s chilling and it’s hard to see how this isn’t the aim. ‘Who ever needed more than a bible?’ https://pen.org/report/narrating-the-crisis/ https://pen.org/report/narrating-the-crisis/ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/books/book-bans-public-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/books/book-bans-public-sc...
      - tivert 3y ago
        > So rather than search out each book they have and keep track of its status, then recheck a few weeks later, just remove the lot. That doesn't pass the smell test. The only way I can see that being even remotely true is if the teacher's goal is mainly to push up against someone's line, politically. Even in the most hostile environment, I doubt you'd run afoul of anyone with a well-stocked library of widely beloved classic children's books.
SpaceManNabs 3y ago
> They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. Sure. The next step is helping them making a decision on which book to read and provide a social environment for doing that. Libraries do not really do that and haven't done that even in the early 90s.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  I am sorry your experience at libraries was so unfulfilling. To me, libraries opened up a world of knowledge. When I was a kid my mom would take my brother and I to the library and just let us loose. As a kid I could spend what felt like days looking at cool cutaway diagrams of castles or reading about how black holes worked. And at the end I took home 5 or 10 of the most interesting books. And it was all free!
faeriechangling 3y ago
If you don’t need TikTok to find good books, how would you recommend finding good books? Even if you’re at a library that doesn’t narrow things down all that much, I’ve been to libraries with several floors filled with bookshelves.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Long before TikTok and YouTube and even Google there was the Dewey Decimal System. We use it to categorize books into a hierarchical tree structure. So I think what most people do is to find a category they’re interested in and look inside that category for either subcategories or books they find interesting.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    The Dewey Decimal Classification is terrible. It's an incredibly dated system with serious flaws like an pervasive European/Christian bias - for instance, notice that class 200 ("Religion") is almost entirely devoted to Christian topics, with a single subclass 290 for all "other religions" - and a lack of effective classifications for modern technical topics. It's also basically useless at classifying works of fiction, to the extent that most libraries don't even bother using it for that purpose. Standard practice is to group all fiction into a few broad categories (like "mystery" or "fantasy", as well as a catch-all for general fiction) and shelve them alphabetically by author. Needless to say, this isn't conducive to browsing.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      i was going to say that a detailed classification of fiction would not really help finding interesting stuff. apart from the broad categories as you mention, interesting books are more defined by writing style, characters, etc. i am struggling with this as i keep looking for new books to read. being in a book club helps a lot.
- devbent 3y ago
  My local library has an "ask the librarian" program. Tell them what you like to read and they'll email you a list of 10 books to try next.
akira2501 3y ago
> Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. At 9 I had no idea how to go into a massive thing like a library and make a selection for myself. "Word of mouth" made a lot of choices for me when I was young.
- MisterTea 3y ago
  In the NYC public libraries there are kids sections where you just walk around and look at books. If something seems interesting then pick it up and read it. I preferred things with technical pictures so the kids section was quite boring.
- triceratops 3y ago
  Weird. At 9 I randomly picked whatever looked interesting. If I liked it, I proceeded to read every single other thing by that author. There was no "word of mouth" because I was the only kid in my class who read for pleasure.
  - hehdhdjehehegwv 3y ago
    When I was that age my teacher had a thing where reading something like 3 books got you out of a lot of homework and your parent had to sign a paper listing what you read and you turned it in. As a kid who already hated school, and used reading as an escape from a pretty shit childhood, I was clocking in 5 books a week. The teacher first accused my parents of lying that I read that many books, because it quickly got to double digits, but I was able to summarize all of them off the top of my head, so instead I was just forbidden from doing it altogether. Not sure what the lesson is there, lol.
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > The teacher first accused my parents of lying that I read that many books, because it quickly got to double digits, but I was able to summarize all of them off the top of my head, so instead I was just forbidden from doing it altogether. > Not sure what the lesson is there, lol. Lessons learned: a) Incentives matter (economy 101) b) If a market offers possibilities for arbitrage, market participants will attempt to make use of them. c) By market laws, arbitrage opportunities will close very fast, so in the long term, markets can be assumed to be arbitrage-free. d) Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. e) Authorities (or those in power) will attempt to cheat you. Don't trust them.
renewiltord 3y ago
It's interesting that all problems in America are due to "funding". It's actually quite curious because funding was a problem for electric vehicles, funding was a problem for space, funding was a problem for literally everything. But then sometimes people come up and succeed at things that others have described as a funding problem for ages. I think I can conclude reasonably from this is that the lowest efficiency lever one can pull is funding. Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance. That's because the people there only know one answer to every problem: "funding".
- devbent 3y ago
  > Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance. It could also be because the schools with the most special / high needs children need the most funding. Schools in poor neighborhoods need more help just to achieve median results. They need to contend with issues like teen pregnancies, drug use, violence, and kids who don't even have food at home. Compare those challenges to rich suburban kids and of course the schools in poor areas need more funding.
- feoren 3y ago
  > Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance. Spills with the most paper towels are the messiest. Why does everyone think they need paper towels to clean up spills!?
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Hospitals have higher mortality rates than grocery stores. If I have a heart attack you’ll find me in the deli.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  The billionaires who look for every tax loophole possible certainly know the value of “funding”. They are currently funding their yachts to take them to their superyachts. Private equity controlled health care companies are extracting billions of dollars in profits (read: overcharging people who want to live) leading to “efficiencies” like understaffing and under training which cause thousands of excess deaths every year. Elon Musk received plenty of government funding for his companies as well. And guess what? BYD sells more cars than Tesla now (a few years ago Elon said he wasn’t worried about them and now they’re suddenly a problem) because of what? Government funding. Governments have also funded the majority of fundamental research which made present day technologies possible. Even today NIST, DARPA, NHS, NSF etc continue to fund science and technology research.
kderbyma 3y ago
I think most of our problems are due to digital marketing.... it's not good for stuff.....something's....but it's not a panacea.... Meta and Google and Tiktok all claim otherwise.....but the cultural effects show. advertising in the modern age is not good ..... it's not sticky..... it's vapid and forgotten faster than the fly you accidentally swallowed at some point in your life...
DavidPiper 3y ago
This whole thread - and that whole chunk of TFA - is totally alien to me. When I was 9, our school had a small library with a librarian (or at least an on-duty teacher), and if you wanted to read something you could always go and ask her what she thought you'd enjoy - and that was on the off chance you couldn't find something that looked appealing. There are also public libraries where you could do the same thing with your parents in tow. When did that stop?
turing_complete 3y ago
Not even recently published. There a lot of great children's classics.

tivert 3y ago

> This part of the article is very off-putting to me. You don’t need TikTok to find good books for kids. Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. They need a library stocked with "books that kids will enjoy," recently published doesn't have anything to do with it. It's not like filling the school library up with stuff only published in the last 3 years is what we need to get kids reading. > The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject. I doubt that's the root cause. Frankly, all the other things seem more significant: making reading education more test-focused and less fun, screens (in a zillion different ways, subtle and obvious), the pandemic breaking peer-influenced reading, etc. They're all probably working together dis-synergisticly. I also wonder if there's other missing social components. I remember in elementary school feeling that reading "chapter books" was important step to being more mature. Do kids still feel that way? Of course I also often read pulpy junk that was fun or interesting, not serious. The OP said: > Connor was more blunt: “Maybe you think a book about a school shooting is really important,” she said, “but kids want to read a fun book. That’s what kids want today—they want to have fun.” I think that's always been true. IIRC, I always disliked the "important" books I was forced to read for school (e.g. the ones that tended to win important awards from adults and get articles written about them in the New York Times to this day).

faeriechangling 3y ago
> It's not like filling the school library up with stuff only published in the last 3 years is what we need to get kids reading. I’ve heard newer English literature evangelized quite a lot since older English literature gets more and more Eurocentric the further back you go. Usually on political grounds, but also with the claim that newer literature is better and more relevant to especially diverse children’s lives.
joe-collins 3y ago
Recent can be a generous time period, but it's not unimportant. When I was very young, I was able to enjoy the Hardy Boys and the Chronicles of Narnia, but even in the 90s, just forty years after the latter was written, they both felt very, very old. When I started finding more current writing, like Redwall or Animorphs, I never looked back.

majormajor 3y ago

sonicanatidae 3y ago
[flagged]
- quirk 3y ago
  I'd like to propose an update to Godwin's law; call it NPC's Law or maybe just Trump's Law if we're being literal: "As an online discussion of a problem grows longer, the probability of assigning blame to Donald Trump approaches 1."
  - klyrs 3y ago
    Not sure it's worth engaging with such toxic commentary regardless of political affiliation.
    - sonicanatidae 3y ago
      Shall we wait for the factual rebuttal or just assume this offhand dismissal is all of it? I have yet to hear a word about the content being inaccurate, just people like you, that didn't like the presentation. My apologies for not refraining from charged words when my country is being stolen out from under me, by some of the worst people in the world, that keep getting elected by the "fuck your feelings" crowd. Also, it's germane to this topic. You, however, remain above it all, so enjoy your pedestal.

keiferski 3y ago

I think you dramatically underestimate the influence that TikTok has on young people. If you want something to be popular amongst young people, making it popular on TikTok is a huge way to do so. Libraries already have thousands, if not millions, of books on hand. I don't think it's a funding issue.

bshacklett 3y ago
There’s a lot more cost involved in running a library than buying books. Staff and building upkeep are big expenses. That said, you want to have some newer books coming in, too, if you want to keep kids interested.

tigen 3y ago

The defunding thing sounds like a bit of obligatory politics. "In some states, teachers can’t even keep a classroom library because they have to protect themselves from book bans" Yeah this sounds false.

SpaceManNabs 3y ago
> Yeah this sounds false. I have quite a few teacher friends in Georgia and NYC, and I can tell you that this is the case for them. Organizations that represent teachers have said so themselves. Hard evidence is best though. Do you have numbers to dismiss their claims?
- tigen 3y ago
  What is the case, they literally are not allowed to have (any) books in the classroom? Can you be specific as to the mechanism here? Do you yourself have any link to any evidence? You (the article) are making the claim.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    I think the argument is quite subtle. There is a lot of book banning occurring and the rate seems to be increasing fast (see links below). There are penalties in some jurisdictions and zero teachers want to face the kind of shit that has gone on with parents and politicians, churches and local body meetings. So rather than search out each book they have and keep track of its status, then recheck a few weeks later, just remove the lot. Teachers do not have time for this crap, and why risk their jobs? It’s chilling and it’s hard to see how this isn’t the aim. ‘Who ever needed more than a bible?’ https://pen.org/report/narrating-the-crisis/ https://pen.org/report/narrating-the-crisis/ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/books/book-bans-public-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/books/book-bans-public-sc...
    - tivert 3y ago
      > So rather than search out each book they have and keep track of its status, then recheck a few weeks later, just remove the lot. That doesn't pass the smell test. The only way I can see that being even remotely true is if the teacher's goal is mainly to push up against someone's line, politically. Even in the most hostile environment, I doubt you'd run afoul of anyone with a well-stocked library of widely beloved classic children's books.

SpaceManNabs 3y ago

> They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. Sure. The next step is helping them making a decision on which book to read and provide a social environment for doing that. Libraries do not really do that and haven't done that even in the early 90s.

janalsncm 3y ago
I am sorry your experience at libraries was so unfulfilling. To me, libraries opened up a world of knowledge. When I was a kid my mom would take my brother and I to the library and just let us loose. As a kid I could spend what felt like days looking at cool cutaway diagrams of castles or reading about how black holes worked. And at the end I took home 5 or 10 of the most interesting books. And it was all free!

faeriechangling 3y ago

If you don’t need TikTok to find good books, how would you recommend finding good books? Even if you’re at a library that doesn’t narrow things down all that much, I’ve been to libraries with several floors filled with bookshelves.

janalsncm 3y ago
Long before TikTok and YouTube and even Google there was the Dewey Decimal System. We use it to categorize books into a hierarchical tree structure. So I think what most people do is to find a category they’re interested in and look inside that category for either subcategories or books they find interesting.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  The Dewey Decimal Classification is terrible. It's an incredibly dated system with serious flaws like an pervasive European/Christian bias - for instance, notice that class 200 ("Religion") is almost entirely devoted to Christian topics, with a single subclass 290 for all "other religions" - and a lack of effective classifications for modern technical topics. It's also basically useless at classifying works of fiction, to the extent that most libraries don't even bother using it for that purpose. Standard practice is to group all fiction into a few broad categories (like "mystery" or "fantasy", as well as a catch-all for general fiction) and shelve them alphabetically by author. Needless to say, this isn't conducive to browsing.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    i was going to say that a detailed classification of fiction would not really help finding interesting stuff. apart from the broad categories as you mention, interesting books are more defined by writing style, characters, etc. i am struggling with this as i keep looking for new books to read. being in a book club helps a lot.
devbent 3y ago
My local library has an "ask the librarian" program. Tell them what you like to read and they'll email you a list of 10 books to try next.

akira2501 3y ago

> Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. At 9 I had no idea how to go into a massive thing like a library and make a selection for myself. "Word of mouth" made a lot of choices for me when I was young.

MisterTea 3y ago
In the NYC public libraries there are kids sections where you just walk around and look at books. If something seems interesting then pick it up and read it. I preferred things with technical pictures so the kids section was quite boring.
triceratops 3y ago
Weird. At 9 I randomly picked whatever looked interesting. If I liked it, I proceeded to read every single other thing by that author. There was no "word of mouth" because I was the only kid in my class who read for pleasure.
- hehdhdjehehegwv 3y ago
  When I was that age my teacher had a thing where reading something like 3 books got you out of a lot of homework and your parent had to sign a paper listing what you read and you turned it in. As a kid who already hated school, and used reading as an escape from a pretty shit childhood, I was clocking in 5 books a week. The teacher first accused my parents of lying that I read that many books, because it quickly got to double digits, but I was able to summarize all of them off the top of my head, so instead I was just forbidden from doing it altogether. Not sure what the lesson is there, lol.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > The teacher first accused my parents of lying that I read that many books, because it quickly got to double digits, but I was able to summarize all of them off the top of my head, so instead I was just forbidden from doing it altogether. > Not sure what the lesson is there, lol. Lessons learned: a) Incentives matter (economy 101) b) If a market offers possibilities for arbitrage, market participants will attempt to make use of them. c) By market laws, arbitrage opportunities will close very fast, so in the long term, markets can be assumed to be arbitrage-free. d) Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. e) Authorities (or those in power) will attempt to cheat you. Don't trust them.

renewiltord 3y ago

It's interesting that all problems in America are due to "funding". It's actually quite curious because funding was a problem for electric vehicles, funding was a problem for space, funding was a problem for literally everything. But then sometimes people come up and succeed at things that others have described as a funding problem for ages. I think I can conclude reasonably from this is that the lowest efficiency lever one can pull is funding. Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance. That's because the people there only know one answer to every problem: "funding".

devbent 3y ago
> Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance. It could also be because the schools with the most special / high needs children need the most funding. Schools in poor neighborhoods need more help just to achieve median results. They need to contend with issues like teen pregnancies, drug use, violence, and kids who don't even have food at home. Compare those challenges to rich suburban kids and of course the schools in poor areas need more funding.
feoren 3y ago
> Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance. Spills with the most paper towels are the messiest. Why does everyone think they need paper towels to clean up spills!?
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Hospitals have higher mortality rates than grocery stores. If I have a heart attack you’ll find me in the deli.
janalsncm 3y ago
The billionaires who look for every tax loophole possible certainly know the value of “funding”. They are currently funding their yachts to take them to their superyachts. Private equity controlled health care companies are extracting billions of dollars in profits (read: overcharging people who want to live) leading to “efficiencies” like understaffing and under training which cause thousands of excess deaths every year. Elon Musk received plenty of government funding for his companies as well. And guess what? BYD sells more cars than Tesla now (a few years ago Elon said he wasn’t worried about them and now they’re suddenly a problem) because of what? Government funding. Governments have also funded the majority of fundamental research which made present day technologies possible. Even today NIST, DARPA, NHS, NSF etc continue to fund science and technology research.

kderbyma 3y ago

I think most of our problems are due to digital marketing.... it's not good for stuff.....something's....but it's not a panacea.... Meta and Google and Tiktok all claim otherwise.....but the cultural effects show. advertising in the modern age is not good ..... it's not sticky..... it's vapid and forgotten faster than the fly you accidentally swallowed at some point in your life...

DavidPiper 3y ago

This whole thread - and that whole chunk of TFA - is totally alien to me. When I was 9, our school had a small library with a librarian (or at least an on-duty teacher), and if you wanted to read something you could always go and ask her what she thought you'd enjoy - and that was on the off chance you couldn't find something that looked appealing. There are also public libraries where you could do the same thing with your parents in tow. When did that stop?

turing_complete 3y ago

Not even recently published. There a lot of great children's classics.