Making Finding Out Fun
By
Peter Usborne
 "Since
1975, when we published our first books, Usborne Publishing has grown into one
of the world's leading publishers of non-fiction for children with translations
in over forty languages, as well as having won many awards, including the Times Educational Supplement
Information Book Award.
"The
remarkable success of Usborne Books derives from the simple idea that it is
possible, without any sacrifice of quality, to produce non-fiction books as
interesting and entertaining as television, magazines and comics -- media
that most children instinctively prefer. We compete with those
"friendly" media in a number of ways, many of them unique to Usborne
Publishing.
"First,
and most important, we spend an enormous amount of time and money producing
every one of our books. These huge investments are essential for researching,
visualizing and illustrating often very difficult subjects, such as computers or
biology in a really simple, stylish and appealing way without losing detail
or accuracy. We can only afford to do books in this laborious way because we
persuade dozens of publishers overseas to share cost with us in return for the
right to publish our books in their own languages.
"The sale of
our books overseas is now so widespread that it is probably quite difficult to
go on holiday anywhere in the world without bumping into an Usborne book. Apart
from time and money, we use a number of other ingredients to make our books
appealing to children:
-
humor
whenever possible,
-
a
remarkably wide variety of illustration styles,
-
increasingly
including photography,
-
a very
high ration of pictures to text,
-
short
magazine-like paperback formats,
-
tremendous
detail
-
totally clear, simple
yet unpatronizing text.
We never, never
talk down to children.
"The
growth in the sales of Usborne books in the last few years has been quite
remarkable, helped, we believe, by a rapidly increasing concern among parents to
support the education of their children by providing stimulating and interesting
books at home. It is becoming more and more widely accepted that the presence-and
ownership-of books at home is one of the key factors linked to success at
school. Many more teachers now accept that parents can, and should, play an
important role in helping with children's education.
"Meanwhile, we
continually experiment with new directions and media. Whatever we do, we always
try to stick to our first principle: finding out can and should be one of
life's greatest pleasures."
Ruth
& sister Nancy Ann with Peter Usborne
UBAH National Convention
June 2003
|
