Novel

You know what? This is a tough question. I could write 10,000 words here about why we probably started to tell stories, and why humans like stories, and what makes a good story.

Instead, I’ll summarize it as puzzles and games make us smarter; stories make us more human.

Books are educational, make no doubt about it. You’ll learn new words. You’ll imagine situations you’ve never been in yourself, and the story will teach you what happens if you act like X or Y. Every sentence in a story requires you to put in effort to learn new information, even sentences like “The castle was gray”.

The whole purpose of stories, I believe, was to teach children how to survive. To warn them of dangers and tell the consequences of acting in a certain way. Because if a story could teach a kid to run away from lions, then they are far more likely to survive their next encounter with a lion.

Stories are incredibly educational. But they’re rarely seen as such because their value lies in more intangible things. No, they will not teach deep logic and mathematical concepts. If you try to do that through a book, it will most likely be a boring and convoluted story that doesn’t really work.

But they teach social intelligence and emotional intelligence. They teach the complexities of the world, that context matters (a lot), that you have choices in how you deal with adversity. They add nuance and helpful associations to everything.

It’s often hard for us to write a book connected to some educational topic. How can we turn that school topic into a fun plot!? But we do it anyway, because we know how much value it has. There are a thousand math textbooks you can buy online that teach you the logic. There are barely any stories that tell you when to apply that math, or even how to apply that math and how to apply it for good.

• If your Apprentices can’t read yet, and you are not able to read to them, then buying a book obviously makes no sense!
• Writing styles and topics matter a lot. Not every book will match with every reader. Let readers sample the offerings, then pick the ones they do like. Even with as much novels on offer as in this online store, none of them might be interesting to your Apprentice.
• Stories are obviously very much language-dependent. And right now we’re only able to write them in English (and sometimes Dutch). Other languages are not available.

You always get at least two things:

• The story as a printable PDF. (The pages are the usual format for books. Your computer should support printing “2 pages per paper” too, creating a booklet if you want.)
• The story as an ebook. (We keep the ebook lean and simple on purpose, to make sure it should load on any ereader you might ever find.)

On top of that, many of the educational stories include bingo cards or small quizzes too. To keep kids engaged, to test comprehension, to give them something outside of the raw story/text. This mostly applies to level 1 and 2, though, in which kids are just starting to read.