Thread:Original TMNT Cartoon Fan/@comment-93957-20170807002426/@comment-995426-20170809143354

In my life experience, it's mostly for children. Basically, if a child asks someone, "Read me a story," then the traditionally appropriate response is to read from a storybook. It could be a book with lots of illustrations and just a few words each page (for very young children), or, conceivably, it can be something second graders read with as many as dozens of pages. But either way, it's generally for the young. I would never qualify Mirage TMNT comics or most mainstream adult fiction as "storybooks" in that sense, though something that condenses or licenses material from one of the cartoon series for young audiences might certainly qualify.

That said, you do bring up an interesting point: This term, though defined this way in mainstream dictionaries, may have variable meanings by regional culture that you or I may not be completely familiar with, and it may warrant at least a little bit of research and fact-checking. For example, storybook redirects to screenwriting for some reason, though we can't necessarily infer that redirect as something decided upon by a committee, since Wikipedia redirects are easy to make and just as easily overlooked. A deeper investigation into the redirect's edit history reveals that it previously had a very illogical redirect before being changed by one other editor apparently without any more formal review process, so I'm inclined to chalk that up to original research and insufficient oversight, both of which Wikipedia frowns upon.

Without a clearer guide for how the term can vary by region (if at all), I'm inclined to stick with the common dictionary definitions, and both North American and British dictionaries appear to share a common definition: books containing stories, especially for children. In its broadest definition it conceivably can mean any book that contains any story, no matter how adult and inappropriate for children, but at some point using the word in that sense stretches the definition too far for most people because of the "especially for children" qualifier. It would be like saying all adults are children by virtue of having been born to parents; a middle-aged man may be someone's child, but calling him a "child" in the broad sense would be weird and misleading.

Well, I'm rambling now.