For more results from this survey, check out Holiday Books Survey Results and I Love You, Keith Richards.
As we mentioned here, our final survey question was about issues of book-giving etiquette. We included a couple of prompts to get our respondents going, but were still surprised by the many thoughtful answers we received. It’s clear that you love giving books but still find the process fraught. Here are some of our favorite responses:
- “I recently added a few of my favorite books to a friend’s Kindle as a gift prior to their leaving on a long trip. It was a pretty hollow gift-giving experience. I don’t think I would do it again.”
- “When sending a package of books to a VIP contact, I find myself putting extra effort into the packaging and presentation of the stack, almost as if I’m afraid that the fact that they are a valuable commodity would otherwise be lost. . . . I end up making sure I state ‘compliments of the publisher’ or something to that effect, just to get the point across that a decision and thought was needed in sending these ‘free’ books. No book is ever free!”
- “Best not to accidentally regift to a friend of the author a book inscribed to you by the author. The perfect book gift is one to a right-wing friend that lets him start out thinking the book is ‘safe’ but by the end has shown him the error of his ways.”
- “Be careful not to give a book that says ‘You need to improve something and here’s how. Also, don’t give a book in order to bring someone with the opposite opinion to your side. It’s not nice to give a book that says ‘Look how smart I am! I read this book and I bet you can’t.’”
- “I always feel like I should have something intelligent to say about the particular book I’m giving, whether or not I’ve read it, and that can be a challenge. But it raises the bar, and generally leads to better (and more meaningful) gift-giving.”
- “Always with an explanation: ‘I BOUGHT these.’ And ‘I loved this book, hope you will, too.’”
- “Whenever I give ‘free’ books (i.e., ones I’ve lifted from the workplace), I always tell people so they don’t think I’ve spent a lot of money on them. But my husband gets mad every time I do it. He thinks it makes us look cheap.”
- “Sometimes I end up reading books that are given to friends for their birthdays at the party, which raises a few eyebrows. Apparently, reading at social events is anti-social behavior.”
- “I always give books to the children of extended family members, even if they don’t consider them the most ‘fun’ gift.”
- “I have never given the Rodale book I published—When Difficult Relatives Happen to Good People by Leonard Felder—to any relative! But I should.”
- “It’s the reading of it that’s the gift, not the book.”
- “Writing a message inside the cover to the recipient supposedly lowers its monetary value. I say it’s more important that the sentimental value is higher.”
- “Everyone loves to get books as presents.”
- “I only give signed books and the unexpected and extraordinary.”
- “Books are first and foremost my choice of gifts for all occasions. Period the end.”
- “I try to give them more as ‘hostess’ gifts than as regular gifts, or supplement them with other things. It’s helped that my mother, as she ages, been telling us not to give her gifts. She doesn’t want us to spend the money, so books do work nicely.”
- “Giving a book as a gift is often neither easy nor simple. But when you hit it, with just the right book as a gift for just the right person, it makes me really really joyful and jazzed.”
- “When I worked for a publisher, no one used to gift me books. That was bad enough, but now that I no longer work in a world of freebies, people forget that my favorite gift would be a book.”
- “I enjoy the books I receive from publishers as perks of our business, but those are for me. I make a point to buy the books I give as gifts, as I believe that authors (and their publishers) should receive their deserved royalties. Who better to support and subsidize our business than those of us who work in it?”
