Why do anything at all to a perfectly good picture book?

Our guest post this week is written by James Huggins from Made in Me. James and team developed the MeBooks reader with Ladybird Books – and opens up a thoughtful conversation about the philosophy of interactive digital books. What do we intend, and expect, from books on touch screens? 

Me Books is a picture book reader we launched in September with our very good friends at Penguin / Ladybird in the UK. Very simply, it allows for picture books to be presented in app form, with interactive audio and the ability to add your own audio anywhere you like by drawing ‘hotspots’ with your finger and recording whatever you like (i.e., narration, sound effects or character voices).

The journey has been an interesting one, and like many of you, we’ve discovered that the very notion of a picture book app is riddled with creative and philosophical conundrums. At Made in Me we love a good conundrum, so we relished the idea of working on some ideas for this space. Many of you are developers, and very fine ones too, so I won’t bore you with the details, but I will share three hard questions we encountered along the way and our subsequent take on them.

1. Why do anything at all to a perfectly good picture book?

We’re our own most vicious sceptics when it comes to using technology. So we ask ourselves whether technology genuinely adds value to the experience, prepared in some cases for the answer to be ‘no’. When we started to think about a picture book app, we decided that if we wanted to offer existing picture books, the interactive experience would have to add richness, support the shared storytelling experience, and not interfere with the original content. This led us to what we firmly believe is one of the most under utilised features in interactive experiences… sound! If we focused not on the visual content, but on the ability to create and manipulate the audio, then it might give us what we were after.

In response to the question above – Why do anything to a perfectly good picture book? Our response was simply – We won’t do anything to the picture book. This means that authors and publishers can relax in the knowledge that their work is being showcased in the way it was intended, and that the technology simply introduces a fun way to enjoy the book, as well as playing with the storytelling creativity it inspires.

2. Why on earth would you make a picture book app with no animation?

We often found ourselves concerned about this question. Would today’s children expect animation from an app? Would they tap the screen with increasing frustration at the ‘broken’ experience. They expect static visuals from a physical book, but what about one that is backlit behind a piece of glass?

If an app presents an animated proposition with interactivity from the beginning, then the child sets their expectation levels in line with a game. If the book metaphor can be established with visuals (page turning etc.) and a lack of animation, then children adjust their expectations accordingly.

My 3-year old is one of the impatient types when it comes to screens. He doesn’t often sit for very long watching anything. When an app presents interactivity he begins to prod the screen and visibly shifts his engagement to the finger bashing variety. I honestly thought he’d never sit and calmly swipe through an e-book with no visuals or bells and whistles to keep his attention. But when he used Me Books for the first time, he clearly understood what to expect from his experience with physical books. Now he sits with Me Books and taps the text and the images, waits for the audio to finish, and then turns the page.

Where I think some apps come unstuck is that they get caught somewhere in the middle. They set the expectation levels on a game experience, but deliver an enhanced book experience. The result is that the child’s disposition is thirsty for interactivity and animation, which places a lot of pressure on the app to deliver. The problem is that what the app is trying to deliver is a story but that is difficult when the child is in ‘Game Mode’.

By withholding those things that trigger a game response, you might think you’re limiting the experience, but you’re actually establishing a frame of mind for the user. Stories need to be relaxed and attentive – two things games are not famous for. Of course I am making some pretty sweeping generalisations here but I think it’s critical to interrogate everything you add to the experience. Is it contributing to the experience you want to create, or is it simply there for the sake of it, or because that’s what other apps do? Remember we’re all making this up as we go along so stick to your guns!

3. When does a book become a game, and does it matter?

This is a conversation I’ve been running into rather a lot recently. I blogged about it a few weeks ago but the short version is no, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the experience serves the purpose that you intended. Is it fun, educational, social, engaging, immersive? Maybe (hopefully) it’s all these things? That would be a very cool app indeed.

What’s certain is that the ability to fuse traditional media such as books, movies and games is going to see all kinds of new experiences emerge from the digital space. To me, children’s publishing is uniquely fascinating in this regard. Unlike other media industries that have undergone a revolution in terms of how the product is created and distributed, children’s publishing is seeing these changes in addition to the product itself being redefined. Take music and film – we might buy, listen or watch them differently to how we’ve done in the past, but a song is still a song and a film is just the same too. Children’s books, however, are seeing experimentation with the very format itself, to the point where it is often very difficult to say wether the term “book” still applies. The recent popular hit ‘The Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore’ was a great example of the creative offspring of a book and film. Regardless of your opinion of the app, it heralds a wonderfully fascinating time ahead for developers.

Thanks to Moms With Apps for our promotion and the opportunity to inflict my waffle on you all. Best of luck to you all with your apps! If you’d like to decide for yourself whether we answered the questions above correctly, check out http://www.mebooks.co