From baby books to picturebooks for adults: European picturebooks in the new millennium

This chapter gives an overview of trends in the European picturebook market since the beginning of the twenty-first century, with a forecast for similar developments in non-European countries. The contemporary picturebook market is spawning more and more syncretic book formats and genres, thus addressing audiences of all ages and leading to the creation of global illustrations and stories. The fusion of different genres and topics is responsible for the emergence of new hybrid formats that demand a reconsideration of traditional genre categories and the familiar concept of the target group. This chapter focuses on six significant tendencies that can be traced in picturebooks since the beginning of the new millennium: materiality and interaction, deployment of postmodern devices, development of new hybrid formats, multilingual picturebooks, picturebooks for adults, and, finally, digital picturebooks.