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 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,
biology or typography, 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; and a totally clear, simple but unpatronising 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. There are a whole range of learning games for younger children, a video,
language-learning tapes, and an activity pack in the pipeline. Whatever we do,
we always try to stick to our first principle: finding out can and should be one
Everything Usborne at
www.Usborne-Books.com
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