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UNPRECEDENTED DEMAND FOR CHILDREN’S CORONAVIRUS INFORMATION BOOK
DOWNLOADED OVER 100,000 TIMES IN 24 HOURS!
Award-winning independent children’s book publisher Nosy Crow has been overwhelmed by the worldwide response to its digital book for primary school age children, illustrated by best-selling Gruffalo illustrator Axel Scheffler.
On Monday (6th April) afternoon Nosy Crow issued a digital book FREE for anyone to read on screen or print out, about the coronavirus and the measures taken to control it. It has been written by staff within the publishing company with expert input from Professor Graham Medley of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who acted as a consultant, and advice from two head teachers and a child psychologist.
In just the first 24 hours the digital book has been accessed over 100,000 times directly from the Nosy Crow website and hundreds of thousands of times further from other hosts. Daily traffic to the Nosy Crow website, driven by the blog post sharing the digital book, has increased 100-fold against the same time last week.
To put this in perspective, the top selling Children’s World Book Day 2019 title sold 66,601 copies by volume in its first week (TCM data provided by Nielsen).*
Kate Wilson, Managing Director of Nosy Crow, said: “We have just been overwhelmed with the response to our book. As a relatively small, independent publisher we have just never seen this level of activity on our website or through our social media channels.
We were very aware that many parents and carers are struggling to explain the current extraordinary situation to children, many of whom are frightened and confused. We thought that the best thing we could do would be to use our skills to produce a free book – accessible to everyone - to explain and, where possible, reassure children and there has been astonishing levels of demand, both here in the UK and worldwide.
We have given the book to our partner publishers in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, who will publish the book as a free ebook in English but with localised information – their own equivalent of Childline, eg – at the back. And today we have agreed that publishers in different countries around the world will publish the book as free ebook in the following 14 languages: Afrikaans, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Welsh.
Nosy Crow’s only condition for giving the book to these publishers is that they will make the book available free of charge and as widely as possible, mirroring what we’ve done in the UK. We expect that there will be publishers in other countries who will want to do the same thing.”
Axel Scheffler, illustrator of The Gruffalo, said: “I asked myself what I could do as an children’s illustrator to inform, as well as entertain, my readers here and abroad. So I was glad when my publisher, Nosy Crow, asked me to illustrate this question-and-answer book about the coronavirus. I think it is extremely important for children and families to have access to good and reliable information in this unprecedented crisis, and I hope that the popularity of the books I've done with Julia Donaldson will ensure that this digital book will reach many children who are now slightly older, but might still remember our picture books.”
Professor Graham Medley, Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: “This pandemic is changing children’s lives across the globe and will have a lasting impact on us all. Helping children understand what is going on is an important step in helping them cope and making them part of the story - this is something that we are all going through, not something being done to them. This book puts children IN the picture rather just watching it happen, and in a way that makes the scary parts easier to cope with.”
You can download a copy of the book here.