And Now Me-Books

Grandma doesn't buy the book for her grandson. She sends $4.49 plus postage and handling and fills in a computer card. The kid's name, street number and birth date, and the name of his sister, brother, dog, cat (or other pet) and friend. Let's say Tommy Snooks of 123 Hickory Stick Lane, with Sister Bunny, Brother Spiro, Dog Tuggles, Cat Snuggles, etc. Eventually, from Dart Industries, Inc., which, as the card says, "also brings you Tupperware, Rexall, Vanda Beauty Counselor and West Bend brand family products," comes a book.

The title page carries a notice that "This book was written especially for Tommy Snooks with love and kisses from Grandma Snooks." The line below the title says, "Your personal story by the magic computer." Thereafter, in the four titles so far to be offered, Tommy and Tuggles and Snuggles, et al. do all sorts of things. Get a giraffe for a pet (My Friendly Giraffe), have a party (My Birthday Land Adventure), travel around as the representative of Santa Claus (My Special Christmas), and go to an animal fair (My Jungle Holiday).

Dart Industries has tested this "totally new concept" with children in Southern California schools, offering a Me-Book along with half a dozen other children's books. They report that kids who never read before began reading Me-Books compulsively. Sleeping with Me-Books for comfort. Raising hell after leaving a Me-Book at the distant home of a friend. Their list of reader and parent responses concludes: "99% of the parents would like to buy more personalized Me-Books."

There is also talk of helping break the reading barrier for good, and perhaps reversing a trend that has seen the reading skills of American schoolchildren decline while reading consultants, advisers, textbooks and remedial reading courses proliferate. "A great thing about Me-Books," Me-Book Publisher Freeman Gosden Jr. told a lecture audience at the American Booksellers Association meetings this year, "is that one book can't be passed from child to child.

Each kid must have his own!"

So what's wrong with Me-Books?

Well, for one thing, the Me-Books so far prepared (by writers and artists who have wisely remained anonymous) are unattractive and vapid, a sad blend of box-top realism and the kind of plastic fantasy that Ronald McDonald might use to flog hamburgers. Moreover, unlike the stories that parents make up for their children, weaving in the details of private life, Me-Books are standardized.

Any child will soon figure out that Grandma and that kindly old magic computer in fact did not write the book for him--since most of the "personalizing" is confined to the repetitious use of names, addresses and birth dates, and every kid on the block with a Me-Book is doing the same dumb things in the same dumb volume. This kind of personalization is in fact just the reverse: it saps imagination and reduces individuality.

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