And so these books, one thing that’s great about them is they’re illustrated so that makes it more – full page illustrations so that makes it more appropriate for younger kids to read and what’s really significant is that they’re printed – I’m going to show you a page here – in a special type. I don’t know if you can see that.
And the type is called dyslexie. And it’s a type font that was created by a typesetter in the Netherlands who has dyslexic kids and so the type font is specifically for kids who have reading challenges. So if you notice, the ascending strokes in the letters go up higher and the descending strokes like Gs and Ys go down lower.
And there’s more leading in between the letters so that they don’t run together and so it makes it easy on the eyes because part of a learning challenge is just the physical part of actually looking at the page and decoding the words. And what we found in these books is it certainly makes it easier for kids with specific reading or processing issues but it makes it easier for all kids.
It’s a really pleasant page to look at.
One of the things you want is for reading to be a pleasure, so we try and make it a pleasure in creating funny stories, in creating lovable characters and then this completes the goal by having it physically pleasurable to read, to hold in your hands and to read so that you don’t – once I was talking to a school and one of the boys said he hated to read.
And I said why do you hate to read and he said it gives me a headache and I thought well it probably does. He’s probably, you know, maybe he needed glasses or maybe just the squinting and the tracking was hard for him, so these books are created for – to be easy on the eyes, easy to process it.
This one – the Hank Zipzer books, Here’s Hank were the first to use the dyslexie font in America. It’s one of those things like how can this be, why wouldn’t we have thought of that before, but it hadn’t been done, so we’re thrilled. It’s expensive. You know, thanks to our publisher who had to pay – this isn’t a typical font so they have to invest in this, but it’s – so we’re very grateful and it’s so worth it from the feedback we hear that kids don’t even know why they like reading.
They just feel good when they’re reading.
