Publications

This Guidance Note was created for the Read@Home project to help writers, illustrators, and designers create books for young children to share with their families at home. Of course, such books may be used in schools as well. In either case, these will be enjoyable books that children will want to read, so they will learn to love reading and develop the life-long habit of reading.  

This document provides support for title development work in underserved languages, including information about the range of genres needed to develop reading skills and motivation and guidance for authors, illustrators, and editors in the production of these diverse types of children’s books.

The World Bank’s Read@Home initiative is an unprecedented effort to get reading, learning, and play materials into homes to address the learning loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread, pre-existing "learning poverty". Connected to the distribution and use of these materials is the question of copyright. This guide details the importance of copyright and the legal conventions that exist across the world to protect the creation of books, including the books funded by The World Bank. This guide will provide a basic understanding of the value and importance of copyright and the various ways in which all parties involved in the book chain – from creation to publication to distribution – can be recognized and fairly compensated. 

Education projects funded by The World Bank procure textbooks and other teaching and learning materials through national and international tenders (bids). Documents for the tenders describe the purposes of the procurement, the qualification requirements for potential bidders, and the technical specifications of the education materials to be procured. The technical specifications provided in a tender significantly impact the cost and quality of the books to be procured and the success of the procurement overall. Precise, complete, and detailed technical specifications must be determined in advance to avoid delays and increase transparency. 

This guide explains standard technical specifications for the most common types of textbooks and teaching and learning materials. Use of these standard specifications will increase cost-effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, and comparability of prices. The guide is meant to be used in conjunction with the Read@Home guides to using the World Bank Bidding Document for Books and the Production of Reading Books.

Access to books (textbooks, teacher’s guides, and materials for reading practice) is key to addressing learning poverty. Children need to be exposed to sufficient and appropriate text, and they need to be afforded the time and opportunity to practice reading in school and at home. Appropriate design of reading books will facilitate learning, support instruction, and promote independent learning. This guidance note focuses on straightforward, standard approaches that World Bank teams and clients can use to increase the usefulness and durability and decrease the costs of books in education programs. The first section describes appropriate font types and sizes based on script and grade level, as well as best practices for letter and word spacing. The physical characteristics of books determine printing costs and durability to a large degree, and so the second section discusses these, with a focus on paper and binding. Printing methods and printer selection are critical for book quality and on-time delivery and so the third section covers printing methods and printer selection. Finishing is the last step in book production and is covered in fourth section and packaging is covered in the fifth section. The note ends with a short list of key recommendations.

This Guidance Note is designed to support government and World Bank teams in preparing accurate and complete bidding documents for books, evaluating proposals, and awarding contracts. The World Bank’s bidding document, Request for Bids – Textbooks and Reading Materials (October 2017), contains what the Purchaser (the government) and the Bidder (prospective supplier to the government) need in order to carry out competitive procurement and contracting of goods (finished books) or services related to book provision (publishing, printing, delivery, and distribution) using Bank funds.

This set of guidance notes is organized in the same sequence as the ten sections of the Bank’s bidding document, from Instructions to Bidders through Contract Forms. Preceding those sections, an introduction provides short refresher notes on the book-related goods and services frequently procured by governments, the typical forms of purchasing for those, and because Bank procurement regulations require competition, the good practices and elapsed time of each activity in the bidding cycle.  

This manual aims to provide practical guidance on the identification and selection of quality children’s reading materials for home use, and the identification or design of accompanying materials for caregivers to support children’s learning. The manual is part of the Read@Home initiative, which aims to deliver reading and learning materials to hard-to-reach homes. It starts with an introductory section which explains the importance of reading at home and exposes the evidence base, followed by practical step-by-step guidance on how to identify and select quality age-appropriate reading materials; how to find, design and distribute accompanying guidance for caregivers; and how to monitor and evaluate book distribution efforts.

This document is also available in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Arabic.

The African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) and NBA developed a short online course for African librarians and library staff, based on the findings of a survey conducted in 2021. The main course objectives were to:

• Train African public and community librarians and library staff to gain an understanding and practice techniques for teaching children vocabulary development, as well as print and phonemic awareness in mother tongue and English. When children are exposed to literacy-rich environments with age-appropriate resources in their mother tongue, they are better equipped to internalize learning as part of their everyday lives.
• Lead the participants to a deeper understanding of how to encourage children to fall in love with stories and reading.
• Use open licensing to increase appropriate reading resources for the target age group through the translation of existing stories into mother-tongue languages.

This report provides a summary of the findings from the pilot od this course, run during April and May 2022.

The Impact of Open Licensing on the Early Reader Ecosystem examines how to use open licensing to promote quality learning resources for young children that are relevant and interesting. Research in early reading tends to focus on traditional publishing value and supply chains, without taking much consideration of new approaches and solutions emerging from the digitization of content and the impact of open licences. Production innovations considered include content creation models, storybook management and storage, and printing and distribution. all of which are evolving rapidly as new technologies are developed and applied. This paper also describes and assesses how major players in the early reader ecosystem impact on the production and utilization of quality resources. In addition, because cost models for open licensing any resource are different from commercial publishing, this report examines how open licensing and cost recovery can be effectively addressed in order to promote the long-term sustainability of local content creation, production, and utilization.

Powerpoint presentation accompanying the paper, Elephant in the Room: The Rise of Open Licensing in Early Literacy in Africa, presented to the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Africa Regional Conference in Kampala in August, 2017.