Analysis the Factors Affecting the Choice of Children and Teenagers Visual Book Format Based on Criteria of Publishers in Iran

The people’s interest in reading books is conjectured to be decreased in future with the decrease in the mean study rates countrywide and considering the descending trend of study time as a result of which the publication industry would encounter a new challenge. The diversity of the audiovisual media and weakness in study culture are the other reasons having given rise to the decline in book sales. One way of creating attractiveness for enhancing the study is creation of changes in the appearance of the books, especially in those published for children and adolescent, that might bring about visual fascination hence preventing visual dishabituation. The present study investigates the factors influencing the selection of pictorial book volumes for children and adolescents as viewed by the publishers based on applied research methodology. Then, the information is collected based on library research and field studies through note-taking and questionnaire. Fuzzy Delphi technique has been the method of choice for constructing a validity-standard questionnaire so that the variables influencing the selection of pictorial book volumes for children and adolescents could be obtained. To examine the variables and find important topics related to pictorial book volumes, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and independent one-sample t-test and Friedman test were employed. The study results indicated that the indicators influential on the selection of children-specific book volumes from the perspective of the publishers respectively are use duration, appearance, lightness, production costs, story space, number of pages and subject. In the production of adolescent-specific books, such indices as use duration, color and design, application, subject, production costs and number of pages were pinpointed as most superior.