How Baby Boomers will change publishing

Baby Boomer are retiring. Baby Boomers all grew up reading before there were computers. Will the fact that baby boomers as a generation are going to be retiring en masse over the next decade have an impact on the book industry? For example, will people who grew up with printed books who suddenly have a lot of free and leisure time want to buy more books? Will they want ebooks or printed books? What kind of books will they want? Entertainment? Learning?

There's much to know about this growing market. And I think the research itself will need to be as creative as the products it is trying to define.

For example, I just read a great article on PSFK about a beer company researching what kind of beer baby boomers want. They are asking baby boomers to enter ideas for the next marketing campaign. Which sounds like a great way to get people involved at a very intimate and foundational level.

Here is how I think that could play out with books:

1. Book Clubs: Publishers could absolutely create nation-wide book clubs with tools like Google Hangouts that bring together thousands of readers at a time. And when people are talking about something they are excited about, what better time is there to figure out what gets them excited?

2. Big Data: The numbers won't lie. Just as Netflix created House of Cards specifically to appeal to the demographic trends they saw in people who watched movies and progams on their service, so too could publishers watch that kind of sales data and figure out which author should be writing about what topic to sell books to baby boomers.

3. Self-Publishing: I think it would be interesting to see how many baby boomers feel like they have a book in them that they have always wanted to write but just never did. And then do something to help them write and publish it. If someone reached out to me that way, I'd take a good long look at the rest of the books they were selling.

Image source: mikecogh via flickr