The Brilliant World Of Tom Gates

This is one of the books, or series of books that causes most disagreements between children and adults in the shop. In case you haven't seen a Tom Gates book, they are bright and gaudy and rather eyecatching. Written by L. (Liz , but initialised so that boys won't realise a GIRL has written the book) Pichon, they are based around the notebook of the eponymous hero Tom Gates. As I have just stated, they are written in notebook form and are illustrated in the form of doodles around the pages, sometimes within sentences to draw attention to sweets or pop groups or other things that catch Tom's eye. The font used is unusual too and it looks like rather scruffy un-joined handwriting. which is part of the appeal of the book.
Tom is a normal boy, he has an older sister he likes to dislike, a best friend, a classroom enemy and a girl he is trying to impress. Much of this first book is devoted to his favourite band Dude3 and his own band Dog Zombies. It's nice stuff. I'm not convinced that the stories are great, but I'm 25 years past the target age, so I'm quite happy to go with the popularity of the books. Children from 8 and 9 upwards love them so much that they have won the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and the Blue Peter book award. High praise indeed.
The point of consternation comes with the style of the books, the hand written font style is very spaced out and the illustrations appear quite basic. This is what adults see and they have complained to me that there is no reading in there.
Here I have a difficult line to tread; there is actually a fair bit of reading to be done in these books, not as much as in a "traditional" style book, but that is the point of the whole Tom Gates series, they are different. They appeal to children because they are not a "traditional" book. If you stripped out the images and printed the font in Times New Roman, then adults would be rather happy, but the charm of the books would be lost completely, and I suspect that they would not be as widely read. They also appeal to children as the stories are normal; there's no magic, little adventure, nothing set in the past or the future, in space or within a broken family, it's a story about a boy who goes to school and his home life. Children can relate to these stories.
I had one rather upset adult thrust a book upon me saying "look at it", meaning it looked shabby and with little content, I head another saying "You aren't reading that, it looks dreadful" both opinions based on the style of the books rather than the substance.
I have a very simple answer to these comments. The child is wanting to read. Celebrate that fact; your child is wanting to read a book. They are not wanting to idle away hours on a games console, or watch mindless cartoons, or do whatever else your average 10 year old does these days, but your child is wanting to read a book. That itself is a marvellous thing. Read it with them, find out why you kid likes it. Bribe them, tell them "you can read this book, if afterwards you read something I think you should read", something classic, something you approve of, but don't turn them off reading. Let them read something they will enjoy, let them discover that reading IS fun, because let's face it, it is. To stop a child reading something they want to read and forcing them to read something they won't like, is the quickest way to them losing an interest in reading full stop.
So if your child wants to read The Brilliant World Of Tom Gates, please let them.