Parents’ conversational interactions with their children during shared bookreading (i.e. extratextual talk) have been shown to have a variety of positive impacts on children’s development. The current study examines an expanded range of children’s book types to investigate the extent to which sub-genres of books may influence the quantity and quality of this extra-textual talk. Four books representing different sub-genres (traditional narrative, character study, alphabet book, life-skills book) were used. Parents (N = 48) read one these books to their pre-school child (M age = 4.6 years) and their talk was coded for linguistic complexity (MLU), lexical diversity, and for quantity of talk providing feedback or encouragement, promoting vocabulary development, promoting book and print concepts, and exhibiting abstract decontextualization. Results showed that some types of extratextual talk, such as talk promoting vocabulary development, were constant across books of all genres ; by contrast there were differences in the amount of extratextual talk and in the proportion of abstract decontextualized talk that varied across the books. We discuss the differences in terms of the books’ sub-genre and the features that characterize those sub-genres.