Internet Shopping!

New LB titles in the style & layout so beloved of collectors are a rarity. Such an item is currently (Jan 2001) available in branches of WH Smith throughout the country! The book in question is called "Shopping on the Internet" and is in the style of the "How it Works" series, although without a series number. The reason for this is that it isn't actually a Ladybird Book, but produced by the BBC Worldwide to encourage people to shop via the Internet.

The £7 million marketing campaign began on September 18th on ITV, supported by a series of print adverts that appeared throughout the Autumn in national daily and Sunday papers, BBC Worldwide magazines and a radio campaign. The aim being to promote use of beeb.com, BBC Worldwide's, commercial shopping portal. It was felt that many "dot com" adverts were aimed a little too high and that a more user friendly campaign might be more effective. The book was a spin off from the campaign, written by Chas Bayfield with input from Jim Bolton and Lesley Henry, the artwork is by Thomas, Connell, Sayer & Pearman. The format is very much in the style of the original, largely because Bayfield is a keen collector of LB books himself! With four illustrators, the artwork isn't very coherent in style, but works fairly well. It would have been asking a lot to produce artwork to the standard of Wingfield, Aitchison et al!

Chas (right) is currently taking his 1968 three wheeled Reliant (called "Pig", also right)) across the United States - for details of this & other exploits, visit http://www.globalicp.com. Here is the author's perspective on writing the book; "As for the story of the book, the brief was that beeb.com make Shopping on the Internet simple. We created a series of ads to go in magazines using mocked up pages of a fictitious Ladybird book 'how it works: shopping on the internet'. We were told we had to lose the Ladybird logo or else face being sued. Bizarrely though, when we ran this past Ladybird, they not only agreed to let us use the logo, but asked us to write the book!

Being a fan of the old style books from my childhood, I suggested the styling, and used another Ladybird collector, Mark Thomas to do the illustrations. As I had written the ads for the magazines, they asked me to write the whole book. I am not worthy! At the time I knew very little about the whole subject of internet shopping, but a few days on the net taught me all I need to know about the history of the modem and the vital role of Douglas Engelbart!Before I knew it, ladybird had signed a deal with Smiths to sell 40,000 copies. My high point was emailing Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web and getting a nostalgic response about how wonderful ladybirds are!"

A similar advert was printed in the radio Times and elsewhere, curiously showing a different book to the one on sale! Let's hope Ladybird realise the potential of "old-style" releases of this nature and maintain the loving care that has gone into this book. I still feel a "Ladybird Book of Ladybird Books" would be a great promotional item and I've offered several times to write it!

Many thanks to BBC Worldwide for permission to display these items and to Matthew Turmaine for his co-operation. The advert itself can be seen at this address, providing you have the appropriate plug-in.