Thursday 29 August 2013

Spotlight on "Love2Read" - Brilliant photobooks to personalise your children's early reading experiences

The Love2Read Photo Books are a fab way to encourage children to enjoy reading, where they can be the star!
Our recent holiday to Tenerife was a lot of fun. But like most parents we never seem to get round to printing our holiday photos out - or any photos for that matter, as the world goes digital and we tend to keep all our pics on various digital or cloud sources.

So for once, it was extremely nice to be able to put together something unique and personal that had a dual purpose. Not only offering an attractive little summary of our holiday, but also a great little reading book for Charlotte to enjoy too.

Coming up with the idea of a web-driven book design service that uses various subjects (as you can see from the header image above, books about dad, holidays, friends etc) that can be tailored in a very easy to use online interface, Love2Read lets parents (and children) put together the books, before they're submitted for printing.

You'll get an absolutely BRILLIANT confirmation email back once your book is ready, then it will wing its way to you in the post.

It's a great idea for parents to do these as surprise presents for children or for books that a child can read while staying with grandparents or other family (our holiday one has been a huge hit with our relatives and friends) who can snuggle down with Charlotte and let her read it to them.

As mentioned before, the site is easy to use and you can save your photobook project part way through and come back to it.

The only thing we could mention really is that there's a list of keywords at the back of the book, common phrases that I'm assuming could've been drawn from the book's text but we couldn't see any way to alter this in the online design tools - so when our book turned up it just had the words "Holiday" and "Book" repeated over and over again rather than a list of words we'd come up with ourselves. It seemed to be the only part of the process that needed a tweak.

The results are great though and it's definitely something we'll consider using again for different book subjects or occasions. So whether you're looking for a unique surprise gift for a child just taking their first steps in reading independently, or just want a brilliant memento of an event or to celebrate a family member's birthday this is a really nice little idea.

(We were kindly supplied with a promo code in order to be able to use the Love2Read Service and try it out for ourselves)