Definition of Picture Book

According to Elizabeth Kennedy, a childhood educator and elementary school teacher, pictures and illustrations contained in a picture book is as important as the texts telling about the story. A picture story book consists of many illustrations on each of its pages, or one spread page which consists of two pages facing to each other. This kind of book is made for children.

However, illustrated books and picture books are different. Indeed that picture books contain  illustrations,  but  not  all  illustrated  books  are  picture  books  (Norton,  1999, p.214). As explained above, a picture book contains illustration and texts which tell a story. Both of them are important and they cannot be separated and work alone. While an illustrated book is a story book with some illustrations applied on periodically, commonly at the beginning of the chapters or at a certain events.

In the other hand, Mary Renck Jalongo (2004, p.11) pointed out that picture book is the same with picture storybook. In picture storybook, or picture book in short, the story are told twice, one with text, and another with illustration (Agosto, 1999, p.267).

In short, a picture book is a book contained illustrations on each pages accompanied by texts which tell about the same story told by the illustrations. Furthermore, children are interested with pictures, thus, picture book is suitable for children.

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