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aCTIvITy 3.7
continued
a Graphic Is Worth a Thousand Words
About the Author
Julie Bosman is a newspaper reporter for The New York Times. She has written numerous articles about presidential campaigns, the New York City Department of Education, the publishing industry, advertising, and media. Her byline has appeared in many different sections of the newspaper. Bosman grew up and went to college in Wisconsin. She was the editor in chief of the daily student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She now lives in New York City.
News article
E-Readers
Word CoNNeCTIoNS
Cognates
The Spanish cognate for extraordinary is extraordinario.
demographic: category of people in a population
my Notes
Catch Younger Eyes
and
Go in Backpacks
by Julie Bosman
1 Something extraordinary happened after Eliana Litos received an e-reader for a
Hanukkah gift in December.
2 “Some weeks I completely forgot about TV,” said Eliana, 11. “I went two weeks with only watching one show, or no shows at all. I was just reading every day.”
3 Ever since the holidays, publishers have noticed that some unusual titles have spiked in e-book sales. The “Chronicles of Narnia” series. “Hush, Hush.” The “Dork Diaries” series.
4 At HarperCollins, for example, e-books made up 25 percent of all young- adult sales in January, up from about 6 percent a year before—a boom in sales that quickly got the attention of publishers there.*
5 “Adult fiction is hot, hot, hot, in e-books,” said Susan Katz, the president and publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books. “And now it seems that teen fiction is getting to be hot, hot, hot.”
6 In their infancy e-readers were adopted by an older generation that valued the devices for their convenience, portability and, in many cases, simply for their ability to enlarge text to a more legible size. Appetite for e-book editions of best sellers and adult genre fiction—romance, mysteries, thrillers—has seemed almost bottomless.
7 But now that e-readers are cheaper and more plentiful, they have gone mass market, reaching consumers across age and demographic groups, and enticing some members of the younger generation to pick them up for the first time.
8 “The kids have taken over the e-readers,” said Rita Threadgill of Harrison, N.Y., whose 11-year-old daughter requested a Kindle for Christmas.
9 In 2010 young-adult e-books made up about 6 percent of the total digital sales for titles published by St. Martin’s Press, but so far in 2011, the number is up to
20 percent, a spokeswoman for the publisher said. *
10 At HarperCollins Children’s Books e-book sales jumped in recent weeks for titles like “Pretty Little Liars,” a teenage series by Sara Shepard; “I Am Number
198 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 6
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