Many educators and parents disapprove of the Baby Einstein products. While I have not picked up any of their videos because of mixed reports of their actual educational value, I have bought some of their books and music CDs for my daughter, and she has enjoyed them.

One concept I liked was the Baby Einstein 12-book library. This is a set of 12 books, and each book is about 3 inches tall, 3 inches wide, and an inch thick. The size makes it easy for toddlers to hold a book and turn pages. The  recommended age group for this product is 10 months to 3 years.

Each book has a theme. For example, the “Colors” book shows objects of different colors. On the “Blue” page, there are pictures of blueberries, blue socks, a blue crayon and other blue items . My daughter has enjoyed looking at the different objects under a particular theme.

However, I think this good product could be made even better by addressing the following issues.

1. Age-appropriate images — There are certain images in the books that toddlers cannot relate to. For example, in the “Shapes” book, the word “Triangle” is followed by an image of a set-square.  No 10-month-old would understand the concept of a set square and it is hard for parents to explain it to them. Better alternatives are a sailboat or a slice of pizza. In the same book, under the word “Star” is a star-shaped cake pan. Again, how do you explain that to a very young child?  A better image would be a regular old star (the twinkle-twinkle kind) or maybe the star on top of a christmas tree.

2. Lack of uniformity — The books have some recurring characters that probably appear in a number of Baby Einstein products. But there is a lack of uniformity in how these characters are depicted. Some characters have elaborate clothing and real-life names . For example “Jane” is a bear and she wears a safari outfit. Other characters like the bee and the tiger are named “Bee” and “Tiger”. Unlike Jane, they do not wear clothes. Another lack of uniformity lies in the text of the books. Some of the images are photographs, others are cartoons.

3. Bad depictions of actions — The “Let’s Move” book has words like “Walk” and “Jump”  and shows images of animals performing these actions. Another page has the word “Run” and it shows a cow stretching its legs to run. It looks like the cow is leaping rather than running. For the word “Walk”, an elephant is walking on its hind legs. In this book too, half the animals are characters that carry instruments and wear clothes, while some are just regular old naked animals.

In short, it looks like the books were hurriedly designed by the Baby Einstein art team. It is likely that they had a database of images from where they picked pictures and put the ones that “kinda go” under each theme. So while the concept of little books for little hands is brilliant, the content needs real work.

What surprises me most is that Baby Einstein is owned by Disney. I would expect that a company that spends and makes millions of dollars on children’s entertainment would have the ability and the good sense to hire some educators for their “Einstein” product.