Since 1966, Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), a nonprofit literacy-enhancing organization, has distributed 380 million new, free books to underprivileged children in the United States. RIF provides these books for children ranging from infancy to the age of eight. Their flagship program, Books for Ownership, allows children to handpick two to five books a year. Volunteers create engaging reading events, revolving around the joy and value [...]
From touch-and-feel genre books such as Dorothy Kunhardt’s Pat the Bunny, originally published over 60 years ago, to new interactive ebooks such as those hosted on Scholastic’s Storia, which come with text, audio, and games, children’s literature has taken on many forms. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. As interactive children’s stories are taken to a new level, classic [...]
It goes without saying that kids’ attention is not focused where it used to be. Children are more apt to sit in front of the television screen watching shows or playing video games than to read or write. Luckily, there are many ways to incorporate television into educational activities, encouraging children to learn in fun ways. Many popular children’s shows were originally book [...]
Audiobook sales, the Audio Publishers Association (APA) reports, are at an all-time high. Their increasing use, however, is met by resistance from those who say that deep reading requires having the text in front of you. Readers of audiobooks claim that they enhance the pleasure of reading and invite more people to read. Regardless of the debate, over the past year the share of [...]
When Todd Bol built a miniature single-room schoolhouse, placed it in his front lawn and filled it with free books, he did not expect to attract a lot of attention. Honoring his mother, a lifelong school teacher, Bol built the structure (about the size of a large mailbox) and filled it with his own books. He hoped that some passerby would stop to [...]
With so many books to choose from, a child may find picking a book to be an overwhelming and difficult task. Selecting books is a valuable and independent skill for kids to learn, instilling an importance of books in their lives. Teaching children to pick books for themselves can be a simple step-by-step process with easy rules and guidelines. Scholastic’s advice to P.I.C.K. creates an [...]
Publishers are finding innovative ways to market e-books to a wide audience. Print and ebook retailing, while often done by the same businesses and for the same market, have differences in the ways the products are marketed and sold. The class of readers likely to read an ebook is the same as those who read books, but the type of distribution of the texts varies [...]
Many upcoming films are adaptations of popular books, a large portion of which are based on young adult literature. From 2013 to 2014, at least a dozen movies coming out are adaptations of novels, both new and old. Based on popular books, the films will be sure to have fans of the original novels filling up seats. One highly anticipated film adaptation is [...]
An article in Publishers Weekly posed the question of whether publishing seasons are dead, reasoning that print books now have to compete with ebooks, which are essentially seasonless. Originally determined by the physical shipping schedule of books, publishing seasons may not be relevant anymore. However, this change in publishing seasons concerns mostly trade cycles—educational and academic publishers, regardless of the format they are publishing, still [...]
Revivals and film adaptations of the immortal Bard’s work have always been staples of the entertainment industry. With a Romeo & Juliet movie, directed by Carlo Carlei, released in October 2013, it’s time again to look back at other famous Shakespeare works that made the transition from stage to film. Modern or modernized film adaptations make Shakespeare more accessible, not only logistically in terms of [...]