From Books to Apps: Content and Delivery

This post is written by Jon Prial of mytales digital, the company he founded with his wife, Elisabeth. She is the Publisher of tiger tales, a traditional children’s book publishing company. Their combined experience in publishing, technology, and marketing lends valuable insight about book-to-app development. Jon explains how they created One Rainy Day, a popular board book converted into an app under the mytales digital brand, and worked diligently to uphold a quality experience for the child every step of the way.

One Rainy Day is a board book that retails for $8.95 and is available in a wide range of retail channels, from Wal-Mart and Amazon.com to local independent bookstores. It is a “concept book” in that it teaches a basic concept—in this case colors. To differentiate from other concept books (e.g., “The apple is red.”), it was playfully written as a simple story about a Duck who comes across objects of different colors while playing in the rain. The illustrator was selected for her very engaging, warm, child-like style. It was published as a padded board book (a very child-friendly format), and to help it stand out on the bookshelves foil stamping was used in the printing process to highlight the falling raindrops.

This warm, simple book sells very well for tiger tales. There are wonderful opportunities for an adult and child to have fun learning with this book. That said, we knew that a straight conversion to an “e-Book,” something that might be in the iBook store, wouldn’t be enough to engage toddlers as the book might. So, in creating the app, we took the following into careful consideration:

Page Layout & Design:We first worked with a designer who went back to the original artwork and created images that use the entire screen real estate on the iPad or iPod. We don’t like to see existing pages letterboxed, or text boxes filling up open space.  As our text is part of the image, not generated via the iOS system, we were able to program our preferred text font with a soft highlighting of words as they are read aloud. All of this was done to deliver a more balanced visual experience, truly integrated with the device features.

Engaging Artwork: Keeping artwork that pops as it does on the printed page is crucial. As we understood we could not render the foil stamped raindrops on a screen, we opted to replace them with a layered animated rain, and added background sound effects for the rain (and for the sun when it finally comes out in the story).

Storytelling: We believe that having a “Read to Me” option is also quite important as children learning basic concepts are typically not able to read yet. Having “Read to Me” helps to teach reading, reinforce pronunciation and enhances effective storytelling. We worked with a sound design and production team and auditioned a number of professional narrators before selecting one that we felt was the best suited for this age group in general and our app in particular. We intentionally avoided using a child’s voice or a non-professional reader. We strongly believe a mature voice provides the child with a safe, protected and non-competitive environment in which to learn, play and grow.

Interactivity: Perhaps the most challenging component to creating an app is to determine the most appropriate interactions—ones that are integral to the story and art. In this case, we chose to add additional dialog for the characters in the story when they were tapped.

Learning Activities:What about additional functions? Having already seen a limitless number of “rub your finger and leave color behind” coloring pages which seem to be more advanced than a very young child can manage, we worked with the illustrator to create custom line art based on four pages of the book, and then programmed a “touch and fill” coloring activity (for the iPad version only), which is appropriate for the target age range of the app.  A reading comprehension activity was incorporated as well, where the child is asked to correctly identify colored objects from the story. Gentle reassurance for incorrect options and positive encouragement for correct responses enrich the learning exercise.

At the end of the day, we believe we have an appropriately priced app at $3.99 (iPad) and $1.99 (iPhone) and have even begun to see some volume purchases through the school discount licensing option. Is it perfect? No. Is it difficult to be found in the app store? Absolutely. Whether you are a book publisher or an app creator, being discovered among all the licensed characters and big name books is a challenge. If you’d like to get a sense of all the interactions we’ve built, we posted a short demo on YouTube.

Our newest app, mybookshelf, is a collection of stories adapted from tiger tales picture books. As this app is targeted at a broader age range, we decided to focus on the story narration and the images. We’re also confident that we have a very simple and clever solution to managing traditional page spreads, that is, images that span two pages of an open book.

It is our firm belief that, over time, content and quality will endure. Although the digital world enables more people to self-publish than has typically been done in the printed world (“vanity press” was coined for a reason), we still believe that the value publishers and agents bring in vetting content helps ensure that the best quality products are brought to market. This, however, doesn’t mean that wonderful things won’t be created and brought forward by individuals. In all cases, success will be measured by word of mouth including reviews and references and, of course, long term sales generated by consumer purchases. Some things never change.

After 32 years, Jon recently retired from IBM and is now working with his wife at mytales digital, llc. He is also consulting for a Growth Equity Fund and has joined Northeastern University as an Adjunct Professor of Executive Education. One of his passions is work-life balance issues and he has a blog at http://balancedbits.com.

mytales digital’s development partner is Sequel Digital. They bring to the table tremendous talent and experience in children’s book design and programming. They also have their own apps and have even designed and programmed the acclaimed “A Present for Milo” for Ruckus Media.