It's a Book [Hardcover]

Playful and lighthearted with a subversive twist that is signature Lane Smith,It's a Bookis a delightful manifesto on behalf of print in the digital age. This satisfying, perfectly executed picture book has something to say to readers of all stripes and all ages.

This title has Common Core connections.

I do love this book. The New Yorker magazine's, Book Bench blog

Those of us for whom books are a faith in themselves -- who find the notion that pixels, however ordered, could be any kind of substitute for the experience of reading in a chair with the strange thing spread open on our lap -- will love this book. Though it will surely draw a laugh from kids, it will give even more pleasure to parents who have been trying to make loudly the point that Smith's book makes softly: that the virtues of a book are independent of any bells, whistles or animation it might be made to contain. . . . For in trying to make the case for books to our kids, exactly the case we want to make is not that they can compete with the virtues of computer or screens, but that they do something else: that they allow for a soulfulness the screens, with their jumpy impersonality, cannot duplicate . . . The moral of Smith's book is the right one: not that screens are bad and books are good, but that what books do depends on the totality of what they are -- their turning pages, their sturdy self-sufficiency, above all the way they invite a child to withdraw from this world into a world alongside ours in an activity at once mentally strenuous and physically still. Adam Gopnick, in The New York Times Book Review

This tongue-in-cheek picture book about reading in the digital age features the best last line ever written in the history of children's literature. Savor it in print rather than trying to read it on your Nook, Kindle or iPad --the punchline will be much better that way. USA Today's Pop Candy blog

Stylishly designed. lãN