Doing its ongoing part to transform American children into overly literate, weak-eyed tubs of goo, Pizza Hut has announced that it’s expanding its long-running pizza bribery program Book It! via a partnership with Amazon. Parents who willingly expose their children to Book It!’s greasy “pages read equals Personal Pan pizzas scarfed” quid pro quo will now have access to two free books, via Amazon’s Kindle: You Are (Not) Small by Anna Kang and Christopher Weyant, and Secrets Of The Book by Erin Fry. (The former book is the 2015 winner of the Geisel Medal for excellence in literature for beginning readers, plus probably a bunch of “participation awards,” because that’s the sort of “everybody wins” nonsense Book It! and books in general are teaching to our kids.)
Amazon’s also commemorating this year’s Book It! launch by offering discounted prices on children’s literature, the better to trick kids into spending their time clutching Kindles, instead of something that would make them seem fit or cool, like footballs or cigarettes. Discounted titles include Arthur’s New Puppy, Ralph Tells A Story, and The Blood Guard, all of which are going to be pretty hard to read through the haze of pepperoni slime spreading like an obesity epidemic across your kids’ grease-stained Kindle. Book It! is also supported with a smartphone or tablet app, allowing children to pick a virtual dragon companion to read alongside them, because apparently we’re raising an entire generation of dodgeball-hating, big vocabulary-having fantasy dorks, and everybody’s just fine with that.
You can read more about the Book It! program, including the free books being offered, here.