As the business of children’s digital content is booming, a small handful of companies are still known as the originators of dynamic educational-yet-entertaining content. At this year’s BookExpo America and IDPF Digital Book conference, GoodEReader caught up with Woody Sears, president of zuuka, whose award-winning iStoryTime line of enhanced ebooks feature favorite children’s stories from DreamWorks’ popular kids’ movies.
Sears demonstrated the latest addition to the iStoryTime family, the Madagascar 3 app, which precedes the movie’s mid-June launch. This version incorporates the kids’ novelizations of both of the previous movies in the series within the free app, with the third title being available for purchase within the app.
While this version still incorporates the popular features from other iStoryTime titles, like read-aloud narration and highlighted text, the appearance of this set of titles has shifted a little to reflect the data on how kids use ebooks. With the majority of young readers taking advantage of the read-to-me option, the developers put more text on the same screen, giving the book that “big kid book” image; that will be incredibly important as elementary readers begin to make the transition to chapter books.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.
