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Monday, August 18, 2008

‘Gossip Girl’ DVD Extra Tries to Steer Buyers to the Books


What may dismay parents about the popularity of the TV drama “Gossip Girl” — besides the teenage sex and drug use, that is — is that it has so many girls glued to their television sets who might improve their SAT scores if they cracked open a book instead.

Now, however, the DVD set “Gossip Girl: The Complete First Season,” which goes on sale this week, includes a free electronic version of the original novel by Cecily von Ziegesar on which the show is based. But — OMG! — it is totally not a book that you read! It is, rather, an audio book narrated by Christina Ricci, with other bonus material like scenes that were not broadcast and “LOL: Gag Reel.” The three-hour abridgement of the novel, which Hachette Audio first released in CD format in 2003, can be transferred to an iPod.

This collaboration, by Hachette Audio and Warner Home Video, which made the DVD, is an unprecedented twist on how publishers hitch their wagons to Hollywood projects. With films, publishers typically reprint a paperback with movie-poster artwork, and audio divisions similarly repackage audio books.

The show’s audience is 74 percent female and its median age is 26, according to Nielsen. Because the young women who are introduced to the characters through the TV series may be oblivious to its origins as a book phenomenon, the publisher has been trying to lasso the show’s audience. The 12 books in the series, published by Poppy, an imprint of Hachette, which is owned by Little, Brown Young Readers, have sold 5.6 million copies.

To coincide with the premiere of the TV series, the publisher printed a version of the first Gossip Girl book with a cover featuring the cast of the show; it sold 20,000 copies in 2007 and has sold 12,000 copies so far this year, apparently without cannibalizing the standard version of the same book, which sold 82,000 copies in 2007 (a 1,000-copy increase over 2006) and has sold 41,000 copies so far this year, according to Nielsen BookScan.

But sales of the audio book versions of the first and second book (also read by Ms. Ricci) in the series have been consistently moribund, even in the wake of the hit TV series: for the five years since being released, they have sold fewer than 1,000 copies yearly, according to BookScan.

“The teen and the late-teen market has been a really tough market for us,” said Anthony Goff, publisher of Hachette Audio and Digital Media.

It is no wonder teenage titles flummox audio book publishers. According to AudioFile, a magazine for audio book enthusiasts, 53 percent of those listening do so while driving their cars, a late-teenage privilege. But among those trying to cultivate the market is the audio-book download seller Audible.com, which recently unveiled AudibleKids, with more than 4,000 children’s and young-adult titles.

Donald Katz, chief executive of Audible, pitches audio books as an educational alternative to music on iPods and iPhones, which are sometimes blamed for making youths more detached and are banned as distractions in some schools. Audio books could “reposition” iPods from parental scourge to “storytellers and learning machines,” Mr. Katz said.

{via The NY Times}

{Photo: Giovanni Rufino/The CW}

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