Personalized Books: A New Trend
One of the best gifts you can give a child is a book. Without a doubt, reading and getting a taste for literature are key to educating children and introducing them to culture. Right from when they’re infants, a love for reading and for books should be instilled through stories adapted to their ages and also their needs. That’s why we’ll be focusing on a new way of doing this today: personalized books.
Many children are familiar with the world of reading even from when they’re babies. However, this habit is difficult to maintain in later stages such as pre-adolescence and adolescence.
There are several new practices coming to light that are attempting to attract young people to reading. However, undoubtedly, one of them stands out among all the others: personalized books.
We’ll now tell you a little more about these books that are becoming so successful in the publishing and literary market today.
Personalized books, a new way to attract readers
There’s no age range when it comes to personalized books. They can be for babies right through to young teenagers.
Having said that, the best ages for attracting a child’s attention seem to be between 5 and 13 years of age. This is because they’ll be totally aware of the fact that they are the main characters in the stories that they have in their hands.
What kind of personalizations do the books contain?
When these types of books started to be marketed, the only type of characterization they could have was to include the child’s name as the main character in the story. Nowadays, however, due to their success, these books have developed different types of personalizations.
Physical descriptions
Physical descriptions in custom books are very common now. They describe what the child looks like. They include the color of their hair and eyes, and their hairstyle. As well as that, they mention whether they have glasses, or some other distinguishing characteristic.
Reading about their own characteristics in books makes the story much more appealing to children. At the same time, they also develop their imagination by imagining themselves as the main characters.
Facts from the child’s life
These personalized books also include important information about the child’s life. This can include the city where they live, the school where they study, and the names of relatives or friends.
Totally personalized stories
Finally, these personalized books have become so successful that, nowadays, you can create totally personalized stories, from the beginning to the end. The person who purchases the book is the one who chooses the story’s plot and characters.
Photographs of children in personalized books
Illustrations play an essential role in children’s literature. Many books are even created with mostly illustrations and little or no text.
The illustrations alone create stories and develop a young child’s imagination. For this reason, the illustrations can also be redesigned to include the child in them, including their favorite colors or clothes.
Another alternative to creating illustrations is to directly introduce a photograph of the child, which will be fully reflected in the pages.
Where can I buy personalized books?
When this type of book started to come on the market, as we’ve already mentioned, established children’s publishers started to create personalized books using only the child’s name as the main character’s name.
As a result of the success of these books, publishing houses specialized in creating these types of books started to emerge. Some of them even offer both children’s literature as well as personalized books for adults, as it makes a lovely gift.
Each of these publishers has different characteristics and different aspects in their books. They either include photos or customized illustrations of the children, or the descriptions we talked about earlier, or a combination of all of these things. In this way, these new types of publishers are helping to supply and promote this new trend in children’s literature.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Rodari, G. (2004). La imaginación en la literatura infantil. Perspectiva Escolar.