Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for encouraging reading. This week J’s school has a book fair and a school book week. It’s run with Scholastic Books and the school get a cut of any money raised. So I guess in a way it’s a win win for them. Encouraging children to read and doing a little fundraising too. The trouble is that the books are very expensive. They are much more expensive than buying books online. Often double the price or more. If I was to buy my son books, I’d get much more for my money online. I could probably buy the book online, pay the school the amount they’d get from Scholastic and still have change left. Therein lies the rub.
We have a bookcase filled to overflowing with books in my son’s room. It’s regularly supplemented with a big wadge of library books. I almost dread book week because I know I’ll end up buying something to add to this enormous quantity of books. We are getting more and more ruthless about the books we keep as adults in our house as we have 3 large full bookcases and don’t really want to buy any more. My son’s bookcase is culled every now and again and the weaker or outgrown books are weeded out. We don’t need any more and we certainly don’t need to buy any more at inflated prices.
I guess you could say that it isn’t aimed at us, but to be truthful I’m not sure who it is aimed at. Those that don’t read much at home may not have the money to spend on overpriced books. They’d be better directed and encouraged to go to the local library. As I’ve said you could buy a lot more books for your money online.
We don’t always buy our books online. J quite often gets given book tokens and he enjoys spending them in local bookshops. Sadly we don’t have a local independent bookseller anymore, so browsing tends to happen in Waterstones. We often while away half an hour in the children’s section of a bookshop. Shopping at the school book fair isn’t such a pleasant experience. For a start there are no comfy chairs (or any chairs at all for that matter). There are only a very limited selection of books available. Some of the books are more toys or activities than books and some have some sort of gimmick – I guess this may appeal to some children who don’t read very willingly. I usually find there are about 5 books that are the right age group and are books that I broadly speaking approve of. I hope my son picks one of those. I try to set ground rules before we go. No toys, no film/TV tie in books, etc. If he was spending his own money, I’d let him have free rein,but if I am paying I want to buy a decent book.
You might have gathered that I’m kind of dreading the school book fair.