Education and Children Reaction Paper
Close integration of seemingly non-profitable areas and business is not a secret today. Probably any sphere that was supposed to be educational, enlightening or elegantly amusing has gradually (or rapidly) turned into a tool for money making. Free economy works that way, and no one can blame moviemakers or songwriters in producing content that is targeted at creating the highest possible profits in legal ways. Reading is turning into a commodity, and it could have been tolerated if it was adult books that were turned into a tool for money extraction. However, I believe that commoditization of child's reading that has already happened is a very negative trend, because publishers tend to commissions books that will produce higher profits through vertical integration, synergy and branding, and these books rarely have any added value except revenues generated by spin-offs and merchandize.
Children's reading activities are believed to be essential in shaping their ideas about the world, their place in that world, about the good, the bad and all kinds of choices people may have. Definitely these choices as well as 'good and evil' concepts are presented in age-appropriate form and in exciting manner. These kinds of books are like milestones against which kids may compare what they feel, see and experience in the world, and make sense of everything. These books feature characters with which kids can identify (this is an obligatory prerequisite for a book to be successful with kids). This is the purpose and the ideal image of a good children's book. In the dispute over gadgets a book also has its say. Both for digital and non-digital parents the main point is that reading was appealing to kids, and medium is a secondary consideration, so parents are more willing to give tablets to children so that they were able to read a good book (Turrin, n/p).
Yet this is a point at which commercial interests step in. As reports of large publishing corporations show, their largest publishing achievements are measured in licenses obtained and synergies created, and not in literary awards praising content and message of these books. The majority of books sold to children today is loaded with links to non-reading material and products - movies, animation, clothing, toys, daily utensils carrying the logo and the image of the book character (Lesson 12, 5). Today a good book plot or story is the one that is easily translated into a movie or a TV show that can be run for several seasons in sequence. Meaning brokering in this kind of publishing culture happens on several layers (Lesson 12, 6). First, the stories for kids are filtered as 'salable' and 'non-salable' by adults, just as the Harry Potter story shows. The manuscript was rejected as 'too long, too old-fashioned, too scary" and not promising from the point of view of commercial success, in publisher's views (Barker, n/p). It was a publisher's daughter's desire to read further into the first book …
