As Baby Boomers—defined as members of the generation born between 1946 and 1964—get older and improved medical technology lengthens the average life span, the number of American seniors continues to grow.
That demographic shift has had an impact on many aspects of American culture, one of them being an increasingly large audience for large-print books. That expanded readership, however, hasn't resulted in blockbuster sales of large-print books, which tend to print and sell in small numbers. The reason is simple: The audience for large-print books, as defined by most large-print publishers, consists of readers over 60 with failing eyesight, while those over 60 are also some of the country's most dedicated patrons of public libraries. So, while libraries are steady large-print customers, retail sales remain low.
Jill Lectka, general manager and publisher of Thorndike Press, which not only publishes large-print books itself but encompasses several imprints that do, says, "Although the demographic is growing, actual sales haven't grown, probably because of library budgets. On the retail side, there's more potential for growth, and it's an exciting part of the business." Thorndike, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2005, publishes about 1,300 large-print titles a year. This year's output includes Lolly Winston's Good Grief and Karen Jay Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club (both released in July). The number of large-print titles from the press and its various imprints (Wheeler, Thomson, Large Print Press and Walker Large Print) has remained steady in recent years.
While seniors are the vast majority of this category's readers, large-print buyers are not only elderly. Lectka points out that large-print books are often purchased as gifts: "When someone loves a book, they often make the next connection, which is to wonder if it's available in large print because their mother or father would enjoying reading it as well."
Students of English as a second language and those who like to read when they exercise are also known to gravitate toward large-print books. "One time I got a big order from somebody in Japan who was teaching English as a second language," says Marian Haugh, owner of the Large Print Bookshop in Denver. "The students liked the big print because it wasn't so intimidating. I also have some people who take large-print titles to the gym and put them on the treadmill. And we have a few customers who aren't elderly, but have maybe had some kind of dyslexia that they've coped with all their lives, and they've discovered large print."
"Once people see the convenience of large-print books, they go for them in all sorts of situations," says Amanda D'Acierno, director of audio and diversified publishing for Random House. "If you're sitting on the beach and it's bright and sunny, it's so much easier to read large print."
Jean Marie Kelly, marketing director for HarperAudio/Large Print, says, "We continue to look to the idea of the growing baby boomer generation, but I'm also the first generation of people who have always had computers, and it's a completely new world. We don't know the effects of 50 to 60 hours a week on the computer on the eyes—that will be interesting to see."
Technology Makes the Future Bright
While medical technology is extending the lives of Americans—thus increasing the pool of large-print readers—printing technology is making it easier to publish small printings.
Kelly says, "Now that we're able to print fewer copies, using new technologies for printing, we're able to keep more large-print books in stock. We can go back for 1,000 or 1,500 copies. We can respond to people's needs." HarperLargePrint publishes anywhere from eight to 15 books in large print with each of its lists.
Still, the production of large-print editions often lags behind the books' standard counterparts. According to Kelly, "It does end up coming down to when the manuscript comes in, and we have to wait until the hardcover has gone through the editing process. We are sometimes playing catch-up. The large-print edition of the Tommy Franks book [American Soldier, Aug.] came out two weeks after the regular one because the manuscript was coming in close to the cutoff."
"We're trying to do quicker reprints," says Thorndike's Lectka, "and we know that customers are very interested in having a book stay in print for a long time, especially when it's in a series. When they discover a mystery author, they like to go back and get the entire backlist. We're getting to a point where we can do that more effectively."
No technology has yet been designed that can counteract one of the major facets of large-print publishing: These books are gigantic. The large-print edition of Bill Clinton's My Life (Random House Large Print, June) clocks in at 1,537 pages (plus the index) and is close to three inches thick.
Some publishers are compensating for the added bulk by publishing in paperback rather than hardcover. Kelly of HarperLargePrint says, "We always do trade paperback editions of our large-print books, because it's a thicker book with more pages. Customers like that it's a little bit lighter, and we're able to keep the price down. It's another way to control price. We try to keep the same price as the hardcover, but sometimes we have to go a dollar or two dollars higher."
All the large-print consumer health titles from Johns Hopkins University Press are paperbacks, reports director Kathleen Keane. "Usually our original titles come out in cloth and paper simultaneously, and once we see a sales pattern we decide later to do a large-print paperback. They may be a little bit more expensive than the ordinary printings, but we've been able to recoup that extra cost, so it has not been prohibitive for us. It's part of our service mission, to keep these health books in print for as long as they're useful."
Retailers appreciate not only the reduced weight but also the lower prices of the paperback titles. Mark Sutz, manager/buyer of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Ariz., says, "Usually the demographic that enjoys large print enjoys a good value. Thirty dollars is a little much for large print."
Haugh at the Large Print Bookshop tells PW, "Several of the publishers have started to bring out a less expensive line where the price point is really good. So many of the customers are older and a lot of them have limited budgets." She lauds the value of paperbacks from Large Print Press (part of the Thorndike group), which include Diane Johnson's L'Affaire and Al Franken's Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them). Each of these summer 2004 titles is $13.95.
Bryan Lovitz, head buyer for the 18-store Atlantic Book Warehouse chain, says, "The page counts are always higher, but customers do tend to get angry when they see the large-print title is $5 or $10 higher. They feel they're being discriminated against."
Bestsellers Sell Best
Predictably, sales of large-print books generally parallel their standard print sales, and large-print publishers—whether reprinting their own titles, as HarperCollins and Random House do, or purchasing rights from other publishers, as Thorndike does—focus on books that are already bestsellers. Bill Clinton's My Life is Random House's largest ever large-print title, with 50,000 copies in print. The press has also published a large-print edition of Kitty Kelley's current bestseller, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty.
"The New York Times bestseller list is one of the arbiters," says Lectka at Thorndike. "We have done well with a variety of bestselling authors like Tom Clancy and Nora Roberts and Sue Grafton."
At Atlantic Book Warehouse, Lovitz says, "We carry mainly two groups of large-print books: current bestsellers and major new releases, and then hurts and remainders. The stuff that's in between doesn't do well. We carry virtually no midlist or minor titles, and we don't get a lot of requests for backlist titles."
"I bring in the big commercial stuff in large print," says Stan Hynds, book buyer at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt. The store's top large-print sellers this year are Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (Random House Large Print, 2003), P.D. James's The Murder Room (Random House Large Print, 2003), Sue Grafton's Q Is for Quarry (Thorndike, 2002) and Thomas Cahill's Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea (Random House Large Print, 2003).
Kelly of HarperLargePrint says, "There are two things we consider: the quality of the author and how much we can sort of ride along on the coattails of the hardcover edition. We've noted that we get a lot of librarians saying we need more for older male readers. We probably would have done the Bob Dole book [One Soldier's Story, May 2005] in large print anyway, but then it made even more sense, and we're looking forward to Douglas Brinkley's book on Normandy [The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, June 2005]." One of the house's bestselling large-print titles was Michael Crichton's Prey (2002),which sold through its 25,000-copy first printing. Crichton's latest, State of Fear (Dec.),will also be available in large print. Kelly adds, "We use the same cover design because we are trying to play off the success of the hardcover marketing efforts."
"I would like to see more history and biography," says Haugh of the Large Print Bookshop, "but truthfully, in my store the most popular stuff are the mysteries." Publishers, Haugh says, are heeding that demand: "I can't think of anybody a customer has asked for in the mystery field that I haven't been able to come up with."
Mysteries are indeed one of the most common large-print genres. In October, Scribner will publish large-print editions of three Janet Evanovich titles: One for the Money, Two for the Dough and Three to Get Deadly.
Christian titles, too, are a large-print favorite. Walker Large Print, a Thorndike imprint since 2002, publishes such titles as Max Lucado's Traveling Light (2003) and Lori Wick's The Rescue (2003). For that category, the company relies on the Christian Booksellers Association's bestseller list rather than the Times.
"All large-print titles we publish are bestsellers. Danielle Steel and John Grisham always do well," says Random House's D'Acierno, who adds that Random is moving into another area: cookbooks. "If there's one time small-type doesn't work, it's when you're in the kitchen trying to cook something. You don't want to have to squint and put your finger up to the page." Covers and illustrations for titles such as The South Beach Diet Cookbook (Apr.) by Arthur Agatston and Maya Angelou's Hallelujah! The Welcome Table (Sept.) are identical to their original editions.
"Cookbooks are good for people who don't want to take their glasses on and off, and a customer who wants cookbooks wants lots of different kinds of cookbooks," agrees the Large Print Bookshop's Haugh.
Johns Hopkins University Press publishes a small number of large-print titles—one or two a year out of the 200 books it produces total—as part of its consumer health program. Keane explains, "We've identified the titles that have information about diseases that have implications for people's eyesight, like The Eye Book: A Complete Guide to Eye Disorders and Health [1998] and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Diabetes for Today and Tomorrow [1997] for large print."
In linguistic reference, Oxford University Press will publish the Oxford Large Print Thesaurus this month.Although it contains more than 150,000 synonyms and antonyms, the hardcover is a slightly abridged version in order to keep the size manageable.The press published the third edition of the Oxford Large Print Dictionary in 2002. "The marketplace is expanding in general, and the latest edition of the dictionary is selling much better than the earlier editions [in 1992 and 1996]," reports sales and marketing director Rebecca Seger.
Showing Customers the Way
Booksellers, not publishers, deal with the end consumer. At HarperLargePrint, Kelly admits, "Our biggest challenge continues to be how we work with our retailers in getting them to reach out to their customers. People are probably still embarrassed to ask for large-print books, because they don't want to admit they need them." HarperLargePrint is producing a sales kit for its summer 2005 list to include advice for reaching out to customers via senior centers and assisted living centers, as well as gyms.
To intershelve or not to intershelve? That's the large-print question at many bookstores. Some mix large-print titles with the same titles in standard font size; others herd the books into their own sections. A number of stores do both.
"We intershelve them and also put them in a special section," says Sutz of Changing Hands Bookstore. "Also, people special order large print very frequently." Bill Clinton's My Life and The Da Vinci Code, he says, have been this year's top sellers. Hynds at Northshire Bookstore tells PW, "We have a separate section where everything fits on one spinner."
"I'm buying more large print than I used to, only because there's more available," says Lovitz of Atlantic Book Warehouse. "More and more major publishers are doing their own large print, which I like. Plus they have better discounts. If it's a major bestseller, I will always pick up a few. We both intershelve and separate. If it's a brand-new release or a current New York Times bestseller, we shelve it together with the standard format book. After a while we have a special section or endcap where we keep backlist titles."
And then there are customers who don't come in to the stores at all. HarperLargePrint is stepping up its online outreach, and mail order is a large portion of the business at Haugh's Large Print Bookshop. "Our mail-order sales are actually bigger than sales to walk-in customers," says Haugh. "A lot of people who need bigger print aren't comfortable driving."
