bi:libri

The Publishing House and its history

Edition bi:libri is one of the very first publishing house in Germany to specialize exclusively in multilingual children’s books. The company was founded in 2004 with the expressed goal of supporting bilingual children in both of their languages with children’s fiction. Our books provide linguistically inspiring designs and a wide range of illustration styles to appeal to every child’s taste. We select universal themes, such as friendship, tolerance, finding courage, facing fears, etc., to insure that our stories are understandable and interesting for native speakers of all of our target languages.

Program

More than 55 original titles have been produced by bi:libri since the company opened its doors, each in up to eleven different language versions.

Particularly successful is our series bilibrini – the little bilinguals for children from 2 years of age. Each softcover title provides its readers with the basic vocabulary for a particular topic (colors, clothes, zoo animals, etc.) in short, simple sentences. A word-picture strip at the bottom of each page supports the new vocabulary acquisition.

Our first readers series billi – I can read bilingually is appropriate for children from 6 years of age who can already read in two languages or who want to learn how.

An additional 15 titles have been published in the series NordSüd / bi:libri. These titles are the result of a cooperation with NordSüd Verlag, begun in 2008, that has allowed us to add famous characters such as The Rainbow Fish, The Little Polar Bear and Mats to our program and make them available in bilingual editions for our readers.

Our titles are currently being produced in the following languages: Arabic, English, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish, each in combination with German. Several titles are also available in Kurdish/Kurmancî, Persian/Farsi and Tigrinya.