Recently I had the opportunity to visit Woozle’s Children’s Bookstore in Halifax, which bills itself as Canada’s oldest children’s bookstore. I brought along my six year-old son who loves books almost as much as he loves LEGO.

The store itself is charming. It’s lively and colorful, and my son thought it was a magical place.

Unfortunately, Canada’s oldest children’s bookstore was stocked with more toys than books. Many of the books that were featured were activity books and gimmick books with attached toys or props. My son did not pick up a single book in the entire 45 minutes we spent in the store. He went from the Thomas trains in the book are a to the smaller toys and gadgets near the cash register, to the Playmobil sets in the side room, where I finally retrieved him just before the meter ran out on my parking space.

The experience left me wondering if a children’s book store could survive if it sold only books. Are toys and gimmicks necessary to draw children into a bookstore these days?

Scholastic has been subjected to much criticism of late for filling their book club catalogs for school children with toys and brands rather than good reading material. Is this criticism unfair? Especially when a bookstore targeting children does no better when selling books to kids?

Could it be that a catalog, or bookstore, with books alone could not survive long in a market filled with over-stimulated kids? Are kids just too used to being entertained to be amused by regular old books?

I know that’s not the case with my own son, who happily spends hours on Amazon•com adding books to his wish list, and visits the library twice a week to find more and more books to satisfy his reading habit. But even he, a booklover born of booklovers, couldn’t get past the distractions thrown in his way by the retailer.

I asked over a dozen parents of school-aged kids about books and toys and such, and they nearly all reported the same thing: their kids love books, and happily buy and read voraciously, but they can be easily distracted by more flashy and expensive items as well.

So perhaps the problem here isn’t that kids don’t read, or that kids can’t make good reading choices, but rather that retailers stand in the way by throwing toys and higher margin items at them.

To be honest, while I did look at the books during our visit to Woozle’s, I found myself lured away by other toys and gimmicky products too. In fact, my only purchase of the visit was a jigsaw puzzle in a box shaped like a book. How can I blame my son for getting distracted when I fell for the same thing?

While I don’t want to deprive any retailer of any profit, I think I might be more likely to bring my son to a bookstore that acknowledged that  books are simply not as glamorous as gadgets and games,  and split up their store to separate the types of products to avoid distracting children and their parents from their search for great books.

Maybe it’s time to get rid of the obligatory train set that seems to be set up in every children’s section of every major bookstore I ever visit. It’s time retailers (and perhaps parents) stop assuming that the adults will buy the books while the children are kept busy with the toys.

Would it hurt sales? I don’t know about other people, but when my son comes running up to me excited about a book, 9 times out of 10 I will buy it for him. When he comes running up excited about a toy, 9 times out of 10 I tell him to put it back on the shelf. But that’s just me.

The only other bit of evidence I have to show that it can’t be pure folly to sell only books to kids in a book catalog or bookstore is the monthly catalog from the Children’s Book of the Month club (Doubleday), which is usually 99% books with only the occasional DVD or toy, and they certainly know how to sell books to kids and adults alike.

What do you think? Could your local bookstore do a better job at selling kids book to kids? Are publishers focusing too much on gimmicky books and underestimating the breadth and depth of the age group’s interests?  How about Scholastic, or the public library? Or am I off my rocker to think that kids would read books if we let them peruse, borrow or buy without distractions?

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