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Why are Usborne books so incredible?
"Children are clever--they are our equals. We shouldn't talk down
to them, but look across at them. |
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Peter Usborne came to book publishing
with a background of having founded "Private Eye," a successful British
satirical magazine. I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Usborne in Tulsa at the
Usborne Books convention in June of 2005. He spoke to us about how he came to create
what has become the world's leading educational children's books. "My wife announced that she was pregnant, and suddenly, it seemed the only thing worth doing in life was doing books for children," he said. Peter's boss loaned him 200,000 pounds to start his own company, and in 1973, he started Usborne Publishing. Usborne Books are written by a 70 member staff, and illustrated by hundreds of artists in London. Peter describes his company as "partly a business, but not primarily a business." Rather, it is a guild of craftsmen dedicated to Peter's vision and the unchanging values of Usborne books. |
More from Peter:
"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 fun."
Read more about Peter Usborne in a 2007 interview from The Bookseller magazine.
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