Using New Media To Buy Old Media
Back in 2007, I published a blog post titled Using New Media To Sell Old Media. It described the chain of events that led from hearing about the book American Born Chinese to buying a physical copy of that book.
My wife and I recently had a another book-buying experience that led to our buying a physical book, and I thought I would describe it here for comparison.
My granddaughter is in second grade and has started reading. We wanted to get her started on a mystery series for kids. Here is the sequence of events:
Ask ChatGPT for a curated list of recommended mysteries for second graders.
Look at the Barnes & Noble website for the first in a series for books currently available at the Barnes & Noble store near us.
Go to that store, examine the books, and purchase one. We purchased “A-to-Z Mysteries Book One, The Absent Author,” by Ron Roy.
We gave the book to our granddaughter.
Later that night we received a video on our iPhones from her parents of her reading the book out loud—and smiling.
Visiting the Barnes & Noble physical store was quite an experience. We are heavy readers and frequent library users, and we regularly buy physical, audio, and e-books. Being in a large and busy bookstore once again made me wonder how many others were there based on online research, and how many were there just browsing?
But it was just a pleasure to see all the displays of books laid out for perusal. My “to be read” stack at home is already high so I had to resist buying more for myself!
The biggest difference between my 2007 expereicne and this one, of course, was the initial use of ChatGPT to locate a curated list of books to choose from, based on this prompt:
I am looking for popular mystery books that would be appropriate for 5 to 7-year-olds. It can be collections of stories or it could be series. When I was a child, I loved the Rick Brant electronic adventure series; I’m curious about whether books like that still exist. Perhaps there are more modern series like Hardy Boys that we could look at for our grandchildren?
ChatGPT came back with a long list of possible series and individual titles, and based on that recommendation we decided to go to our local Barnes & Noble to examine them physically, since the B&N website also told us which were in stock there.
I know there was once a fear that modern media would be the death of traditional publishing, and I heard that fear firsthand during my years of involvement with electronic publishing.
I don’t know how serious that fear is now. My own experience as described here shows multiple modern media supporting the purchase of a physical book. That seems pretty normal to me.
Copyright (c) 2025 by Dennis D. McDonald
