Amazon Rapids is a new program that has just been launched today and it features short stories for kids. All of the content is delivered in the style of an instant messaging app and are told through the lens of characters chatting with each other, one message at a time.
Younger children might enjoy the “read to me” mode that uses a phone or tablet’s text-to-speech feature to read out each story. Kids can also click on any word to look it up and save it in a glossary.
“We wanted to invent a new way for reading, to get kids to have fun reading,” Michael Robinson, Amazon Education’s director of consumer products. Robinson also stresses that the Rapids app is less about teaching kids how to read, and more about making them look forward to reading and blends it all together with lots of humor.
Instead of selling the stories individually, Amazon has employed the subscription model that gives access to hundreds of stories for $2.99 per month. The Amazon Rapids app is available on Fire, Android, and iOS (coming soon) devices.
Honestly, I think that Amazon should’ve added this new feature to Amazon FreeTime Unlimited, instead of fragmenting their children’s reading subscription services.
You can download Amazon Rapids from the Good e-Reader App Store.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.