Introduce Your Kids to a Variety of Books With This Service
Many parents would like to fill our children’s bookshelves with a variety of characters, storylines, and family structures. However, it is easier said than done when a wide variety of high quality inclusive books can be found .
Many books featuring different characters are published by foreign publishers or small publishers that do not have large marketing and sales networks to bring their books to families who want them. That’s why Allie Harper launched OurShelves , a children’s book subscription service that curates these books for its members. She talked about her decision to launch OurShelves recently on the One Bad Mother podcast :
Our two children have two mothers, and we were surprised when almost 7 years ago we had the oldest … We started asking for recommendations for quality, age-appropriate children’s books that featured families with two mothers like ours. We were very surprised at how difficult it was to find these books.
And the second observation that we had was that there is simply not enough high-quality variety of children’s books, period. OurShelves stems from these two observations, which is why we launched OurShelves with a dual mission.
This dual mission, Harper says to One Bad Mother , is to connect existing high-quality and diverse books with those seeking them, and advocate for more of those books to be published.
Part of what we are trying to do is also to prove that this really large and significant audience of these books, we think, is currently underestimated. So when people subscribe to OurShelves and buy different book boxes, they not only connect these wonderful books to their children and develop their inclusive values, they are also considered part of the big market demand for these books, which is really important for publishers like move away from the perceived heightened risk of creating these books to actually grasp all the possibilities that exist in creating these books.
Subscriptions can be customized based on the age of the child, the number of books you want per box, and the number of boxes you want to receive (currently all boxes are shipped quarterly). Subscriptions are for children aged 0-2, 2-5, and 5-8 years old. The price per book ranges from $ 13.99 to $ 19.99, depending on how many books you choose for each box and how many boxes you subscribe to (the cost of each book goes down the more you buy).
While you won’t know exactly what titles you’ll get until the box arrives, here are some examples and the company states, “Any box with at least three books is guaranteed to include LGBTQ +, racially and ethnically diverse, and feminist. characters and families, among many others, are currently underrepresented. “