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Sparkle and Spin: A Book about Words. Written by Ann Rand, illustrated by Paul Rand

Apologies to readers of Swiss Miss and Drawn, of whom I know there are many reading this post. This news has already been posted on both those blogs, but it is just too good to ignore.

What you see embedded above, You-Tube style, is a children’s picture book in its entirety, provided by a new site named Lookybook. Go on, click on it!

The site works in collaboration with publishers, writers and illustrators to allow its users to flick through a picture book page by page. Far removed from the narrow-minded thinking that has had publishers fear the loss of their copyright, the ethos of this site is that nothing replaces a real book in the hands of a youngster, and that services such as this will actually make you more likely to buy the very best books, not less. The same kind of thinking that has spawned sites like Last.fm and Pandora.com in music, I guess.

They quite rightly point out that what we see in our bookshops tends to be only a very small selection of the best-selling offerings, and as Lookybook expands, it hopes to have many thousands of books for you and your children to explore at your leisure. In that way, it’s just another example of the internet democracising the buying process. But there are simpler benefits, too. As Swiss Miss points out, there’s no longer any need to panic if you haven’t packed that favourite book - so long as you have an internet connection.