One Dad's Request to Children's Book Publishers

Aaron Sharp | January 19, 2021

Dear Children’s book publishers,

You know I love you right? My love of reading began when I was a kid. I married a beautiful woman who fell in love with reading when she was a kid. Our Christmas presents for the 4 Sharpnadoes included a boxed-set of the first 10 Hardy Boys books, Dragons Love Tacos, Dino Dana’s Field Guide (Volumes 1 & 2), and The Disney Princess Cookbook. I say all that to say that I am definitely in your corner. You are my people.

BUT

Can I make one small request? As a father, and an author, who loves to buy his kids books, I am asking you to please stop publishing books with buttons that require batteries. Or at the very least all get together on what size battery you are going to use.

First, books don’t need buttons, that is the whole point of books. For now we will let this one go, but think about.

Second, and this is my main issue, you all seem to be using different sizes of small, never-before-seen batteries. Now, if you are also the sole producer of one of these sizes of batteries and you use that in your books I could understand. That would actually be quite the business proposition, and if this post inspires you to do that I only expect a small renumeration, but let’s get back to my venting.

Just this last week I had to buy one size of small, rare batteries for Who Goes Roar? and then I had to turn around and buy another size of small, rare batteries for Jurassic Farts. After nine years of fatherhood I have a nice collection of small, rare batteries, but somehow each book seems to require a different size that I’ve never seen before in my life.

Please, for parents everywhere, just print books with pages. We don’t really need the buttons that in turn require another size of small, rare battery. I know they are cute, and kids love to pick them out at the bookstore, but just make this little change for us.

Sincerely,

One dad/battery collector on behalf of parents everywhere