Hi HN, Bookvine.io helps find age appropriate books for kids, with links to get it from Amazon or your local county library (limited to US for now). This was created by my 13yr old son who is an avid reader. I used to spend hours trying to get the right books for him to read and then get it from local county library or Amazon. He wanted to create this site from the books that he has read - to help others in a similar situation.
He used Webflow to create the site (I am a software engineer and guided him thru the process and some custom JS coding that was required) More about the story in the About Page. We would love some feedback or suggestions, to help improve the website. (there are no ads/no sign up/no monetary benefit etc) There are almost 300 books, along with reviews and recommendations - categorised by age - to make it easier for parents and kids to pick the next book to read easily.
This is a difficult problem to solve for some kids, because there are at least two dimensions to consider:<p>- language difficulty (which is what lexile aims to measure)<p>- how appropriate the topic is<p>My 5.5yo son is decoding words at about 4th grade level (based on an informal 'San Diego Quick Assessment'). But he's limited in his reading by:<p>- his life experience and existing knowledge, which both affect comprehension<p>- his willingness to read books that have few pictures (he doesn't like books that have 10 pages between pictures)<p>It's hard to find books that are age-appropriate (based on topic and maybe format) but also have challenging language (vocabulary, grammar).
I always found it interesting how different books for teenagers were from movies considered appropriate for the same age group.<p>For example, the "Cherub" series by Robert Muchamore, which I greatly enjoyed as a kid, included crime, drug and alcohol use (even by kids), sex scenes, mentions of underage prostitution and human trafficking, and even a scene of an attempted rape on a minor. The much more popular "Hunger Games" series was a little bit less violent, but not by much. Nobody seemed to mind. Those books were clearly intended for teenagers, I'd say 12-16 year olds, and there were no disclaimers about what those books contained.<p>Even with TV, things aren't as obvious as they seem. Over here in Poland, very few parents care about age restrictions. Unlike English, we don't even have a word for "explicit content". Creating online accounts with fake dates of birth is pretty much normal. When I was in middle school, most people I knew watched porn with very few difficulties. Game stores don't have any obligations to restrict what kids can buy, it's not even clear if refusing a game sale based solely on the age of the buyer is legal[1]. When one game store refused to sell GTA5 to a kid, I heard about it on the news. When I compare people of my generation raised in Poland to our American peers, where explicit content is much more of a taboo, I see no noticeable effects of watching such content.<p>This has some disturbing censorship implications, how many real-life phenomena are filmmakers omitting to get just a little bit more viewers, just because of some well-intended laws that seem to have no actual positive effect on society?<p>[1] Polish <a href="https://bezprawnik.pl/sprzedaz-dziecku-gry-dla-doroslych/" rel="nofollow">https://bezprawnik.pl/sprzedaz-dziecku-gry-dla-doroslych/</a>
Well done, this is great. I’ve already sent my wife a link to it. We are mostly through the original magic treehouse series and we need a new book series to read to our 4 year old. Amazon search is a wasteland for this sort of thing.<p>Let’s talk SEO. You need pages like this:<p>books-for-6-year-olds<p>books-for-7-year-olds<p>Etc<p>We have a site crontab.guru and you would not believe the traffic we get on our “every n minutes” pages. Long tail!<p>One more.. in your book pages I would change /series/ to /review/
FYI: Just noticed a small mistake. "The Call of the Wild" attributed to George Orwell when it should be Jack London.<p>Also, my kid is really enjoying the Dragon Masters series right now, seems good for the younger readers just getting interested in chapter books.
Thanks for putting together the site, it's amazing that your son read 300 books already.<p>Suitability of books is a complex topic, but the site is a good start.<p>Typo: Animal Farm is by George Orwell (= Eric Blair), not by Jack London as the site says.
When I grew up, there were great children picture books in China like these: <a href="https://m.sohu.com/picture/259669024" rel="nofollow">https://m.sohu.com/picture/259669024</a><p>These books have great pencil drawings and text paragraph under each picture. They are not like Japanese cartoons which have almost no text. Their drawings are also not cartoonish.<p>Come to the US, I couldn’t find anything similar. There’s no new publication of these kind of books in China either.
Thank you for this.<p>Suggestion: I'm looking at the 10-14 list. When I click "Next Page", it retains the "book series" section on top and the actual next page I have to scroll halfway down the screen to see. I'm not expecting to have to skip over the book series section <i>again</i> to get to the next page of individual books. Difficult and confusing, at best.
This is a great list, though our 6 year old has brought about half of the age appropriate stuff home from the school library already.<p>Need to look at the other half.
:-)