“Backlist titles are still brand new to most readers”
The latest Panorama Picks have been announced by the Panorama Project, spotlighting notable recent fiction, nonfiction, and young adult ebooks with the highest unmet demand in United States public libraries. The nine regional lists feature 25 titles in each category—185 unique titles in total, including 62 of which are unique to a single region—reflecting both the overlapping and distinctive interests of readers across the country.
“This round of Panorama Picks is a snapshot of a unique period of time for public libraries,” said Panorama Project lead, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, “as a number of factors potentially impacted readers’ interests and behaviors. From the COVID-19 pandemic closing schools, physical bookstores, and library buildings driving a reported increase in digital circulation, to anticipated new releases being pushed to the Fall, and Macmillan ending its controversial embargo on library ebooks—it’s been a disruptive time for the publishing industry.”
“Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these latest Picks is that it aligns with NPD Books’ recent report [PDF] on the strength of backlist titles which represented an all-time high of 69% of print sales in Q2 2020,” explained Gonzalez. “For every bestseller that captures national attention, there are literally hundreds of backlist titles that are still brand new to most readers—and Panorama Picks helps surface the ones they’re actively interested in.”
The new lists measure public library activity from April – June 2020, featuring books published from April – December 2019. This is the first Panorama Picks to include Macmillan ebooks that would have been embargoed for their first eight weeks after publication, but the circulation period measured is after the embargo was lifted, so its overall impact on unmet demand and consumer sales is currently unclear.
Among titles with notable unmet demand in a single region were Jennifer Donnelly's Stepsister; Sarah Kuhn's I Love You So Mochi; Abdi Nazemian's Like a Love Story; Andy Weir's Cheshire Crossing; Brian Doyle's One Long River of Song; Tieghan Gerard's Half Baked Harvest Super Simple; Laura Lavender's Creative Lettering and Beyond; Abby Stein's Becoming Eve; Katherine Center's Things You Save in a Fire; Amal El-Mohtar's This Is How You Lose the Time War; Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadow, and J. Ryan Stradal's The Lager Queen of Minnesota.
Q2 2020 Panorama Picks w/ unique regional unmet demand
Titles that were popular in multiple regions but had limited availability in public libraries to meet reader demand include Amie Kaufman's Aurora Rising; Marie Lu's Rebel; Isabel Sterling's These Witches Don't Burn Series, Book 1; Mariko Tamaki's Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me; Alix E. Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January; William Kent Krueger's This Tender Land; Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue; J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye; Abhijit V. Banerjee's Good Economics for Hard Times; BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits; Dan Piepenbring's Chaos; and Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You to Be Rich.
Q2 2020 Panorama Picks w/ multi-region unmet demand
Demonstrating the resilience of backlist, Harrow, McQuiston, and Stradal’s books also appeared on multiple lists last quarter—demand still waiting to be met.
“Public libraries’ physical and digital collections often reflect their respective community’s potential readership, so they tend to be more diverse than the average bookstore’s shelves,” concluded Gonzalez. “Panorama Picks offers useful regional insights into those digital collections that publishers and booksellers can use to take NPD’s Kristen McLean’s advice to identify ‘opportunities to help communities, educators, and readers solve problems.’”