Are Yearbooks Worth It? Should I buy a yearbook?

By Lynn Greenberg

With social media and cell phones, parents and students wonder if it’s worth it to buy a yearbook. We can access many memories and photos in seconds, so why buy a yearbook? 

Buying a yearbook was a “no-brainer” for many of us because it was the only way to see photos of our school experiences. Still, today’s students can capture almost any moment themselves, and they are available right in their hands. There are still some places and times they cannot get a photo, and that’s during a school day or when they participate in an activity.

Other reasons to buy a yearbook:

• A yearbook is a memory book. It captures one year in one book of the life and events of a student body and school community.
• A yearbook is like a time capsule capturing trends in fashion, music, hairstyles, events, achievements, clubs, teams and friendships.
• A yearbook includes references to friendships through the signatures and notes written by your friends and classmates at that time.
• A yearbook can look at the year from a third-person perspective, where students, teachers, staff, and families can look at everything outside of their point of view.
• A yearbook can help remember friends and teachers.
• A yearbook helps students show their families what life was like when they were in school.

The yearbook offers the ability to see in one book a year in the life of the people who lived it with details like dates, descriptions, and names to look back on in the future long after they have been forgotten.

The ability to look at the events you weren’t a part of, activities you participated in, or from a different view. Not to mention being able to see what your friends and classmates were doing when you were busy with other things and your life.

Yearbooks remind you of the connections you had with teachers, staff, friends, and classmates you lose touch with when life moves on or connect with long after you are no longer in school together or when you didn’t even know each other until later in life.

Yearbooks are a fun way to connect with younger generations, like our kids and grandkids or the next generation. They can see the style of clothes and hair or just connect with your children to show them what life was like when you were their age. As I was cleaning out a closet at school with boxes and boxes of forgotten yearbooks from the last 30 years, I enlisted the help of my kids and a few of their friends. Funnily enough, I had to finish the job independently because while they helped some, they got sidetracked looking at the yearbooks from the last 20 years. They looked up teachers who were in their first year of teaching or were students. They compared the clothes, hairstyles, and uniforms from the past to what they wear today. They were so engrossed they didn’t hear the bell ring; we had to get their attention and tell them it was time to leave.

Your Yearbook Company Makes the Difference

Entourage Yearbooks play a big part in making my yearbooks by allowing me to include more events and activities throughout the year. This makes the book more treasured because I am able to include more items from the year with due dates later than other yearbook companies, giving me more flexibility with my layouts. I can also include students who move into the district after picture day so more students are included.

Entourage Yearbooks allows me to group my portraits by homeroom teacher instead of alphabetically for the entire grade or school, which means it’s easier to group memories specific to that group or class. Entourage has a standard Year In Review and the ability to create my own Year In Review or About Me pages based on the students’ votes and responses to custom questions.

I have worked with other yearbook companies, and their due dates are so early in the year before friendships can develop and activities and events can take place. Their standard layouts feel impersonal, but with Entourage Yearbooks, I found a way to give my yearbooks a more personal, almost scrapbook feel so that each student, group, or activity can be represented. That’s what makes a yearbook worth buying. Those moments may only last a minute in real life, but in a yearbook, they are forever.

To quote Elias Jo, CEO of Entourage yearbooks, “Yearbooks are the original social media.”

Is a yearbook worth it? The answer is YES, especially when I see my children making new friends each year and then using their yearbooks as a reference to look them up in previous years or my children who have graduated going back to look at friends. When a yearbook advisor tells me that they get several calls each year asking for a copy of their yearbook that was lost or damaged, I know these books provide special memories.

I am also one to go back to show my kids something, discover something new about my former classmates, and read all the signatures and notes. There’s nothing like reliving a moment through a K/I/T with a phone number that no longer works.