Two Essential Features for Digital Picture Books (a note to developers from your readers)
New options are coming to digital Dr. Seuss titles from Oceanhouse Media!
Just this week, several Oceanhouse Media titles, from their popular Dr. Seuss collection, including Green Eggs and Ham, have added recordable narration and additional settings that include page guides for easier navigation. This is an exceptional step and not an easy programming effort on the part of a major developer of book apps. It is also a change I am deeply grateful for as a parent, educator and reviewer of digital children’s books. I look forward to seeing more popular titles include these types of updates. They are free for anyone who has previously purchased the book apps, but not inexpensive on the part of the developer, so a thank you is in order. Other major developers, like Auryn Apps, iStorytime and even Disney Digital Books, should also be commended for having so many flexible settings for audio and navigation. These settings are sometimes an afterthought in the process of creating a book app, but they shouldn’t be … the story is truly at the center of the process, but an app’s settings in the book category can make or break a great read.
I get a lot of requests for advice from developers of book apps and digital books for children, as well as lots of suggestions from readers, including parents, librarians and educators, who find the current book app market both exciting and frustrating (at times). Rather than having these conversations individually, as I have been doing over the past two years, this post is my attempt to share two of the most common things I get questions about from developers (and suggestions for changes from readers), regarding book apps in general.
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop focuses on the new challenges children face today, asking the 21st century equivalent of her original question, “How can emerging media help children learn?”
These two features have really stood out in my mind as I review and read digital books with my child. One of them is something digital can do that print cannot. It is the thing that can make digital more valuable than print and often a literacy game-changer for many young readers. That thing is highlighting text word-by-word, to match the narration. For more insights about this, check out the reports coming out of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.
The second feature is something that print does beautifully but digital doesn’t do naturally. Developers need to add this feature, not as an afterthought, but as a standard setting by putting a simple visual and numbered page guide. As a reader, I grudgingly overlook the absence of a page guide in a picture book of less than 10 pages. Yet, so many book apps have no way to properly navigate beyond linear reading, even when they are over 100 pages long. As a result, the reader is left with no way to gauge the length of a title in app form nor a way return to a favorite page easily.
Word-by-Word Highlighting:
The most consistent request I get from parents & educators about features for book apps and ebooks (like iBooks) in general for their kids, even older readers, is highlighting. I didn’t think it was all that vital when I started reviewing book apps, but it is literally the most important feature a book can add that people who buy digital books for their kids seem to want. Narration is so essential, in and of itself, that I feel there is no debate left there … a digital picture book must narrate its text, if it plans to have any spot on the digital bookshelf.
Word-for-Word Highlighting in Book Apps is a Game-Changer for Reluctant Readers
I still remember talking to a friend who was an elementary school teacher, in the months before my site launched in late 2010, and being surprised at how adamant she was that I be sure and include information about which books had highlighting along with narration. “This is why I’m excited about digital,” she said to me. The basic message is: why skimp on something you can do for kids struggling to read if it can be done relatively easily?
Ideally highlighting and narration should allow for an ‘on/off’ setting in all digital books for kids. PicPocket Books does a nice job with this, despite otherwise having simple production values for their top notch titles, often based on out-of-print picture books. But I should note that users (like myself) often feel highlighting with narration is an ‘easy-add’ to a digital format. This is simply not true, at least from my recent experience in developer forums and being married to my own personal ‘tech guy’. Adding word-for-word narration is actually one of those ‘harder said than done’ aspects of digital books. The programming required to carefully match word to text, as it is narrated, is complex and not always an efficient use of resources when coding a book app. But this is one of those few areas of high tech effort I consider very valuable. If you can drop a few other ‘bells and whistles’ from your app’s animation and interaction and put that time into proper word-for-word highlighting, I’d say that’s a much better use of resources for a book app development team.
Digital Page Numbers & Guides:
Page guides, or a visual set of ‘thumbnail’ images to represent each page, are the other major feature that deserves more attention by book app developers. So many long picture book apps have failed to include page guides (or even page numbers) that, as a thorough reviewer of books in digital, it makes me a little crazy. I literally count the pages of every book, which means swiping pages, sometimes over 100 of them, to get an accurate page count. And then, should I want to return to a specific page to quote something interesting, it is nearly impossible to do in a book over 20 pages. But not only reviewers care about this … my child often wants to find a specific page in a favorite book app but is unable to, since there is no page guide. And what if a teacher would like to highlight a specific passage as part of a writing assignment or other project?
So I beg of you, as developers of book apps … please, please … follow the lead of one of the biggest and best producers of children’s book apps, Oceanhouse Media, and add page guides to your digital books. The rule is this, if your app has ‘pages’ then it needs a page guide. Period. My hats off to the talented people who have created so many wonderful picture books and continue to be committed to improving them for our young readers. I look forward to more updates soon, to all my favorite Seuss titles (and many other popular OmBook titles). It will make reading not just fun, but also a little less frustrating!
What other features would you like book app developers to consider standard?
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Carisa, on the other hand these features are relatively easy to implement in iBooks if you build ePub3 files. The page guide is included as one of the default navigation features and word highlighting is possible by including SMIL files that link time stamped code to audio files.
What are your thoughts on individual word highlighting in books where the narrator doesn’t speak very slowly or there are lots of word on a page? I find that iBooks can lag a little, especially on the iPad1, and it doesn’t really work. Is it acceptable in that case to highlight each line or sentence?
That’s an excellent question, Liam (as well as a good point about ebook formats, like iBooks, making a page guide more standard). Standardized settings can make the digital transition a bit easier, but book apps seem to be in a liminal space, with so much variation that I think it confuses a lot of consumers.
I don’t personally think highlighting is absolutely necessary in books aimed at kids over 10 (although it is very nice, especially for struggling readers), but I consider highlighting by phrases or even sentences a better solution than having the narration less ‘fluid’ (or having a lag between words). Every book (and app) is individual of course, but ultimately I would prefer that all the elements integrate well, over following any one of my own ‘rules’.
I love ‘wordless’ picture books in print, for instance, which by their very nature shouldn’t have narration. However, leaving no audio at all, not even a touch of music, can make an app seem almost ‘broken’ to users, so it’s a delicate dance. With content creators ‘trail blazing’ so much in digital right now, I also appreciate risk taking in apps, even when it doesn’t end up working perfectly, since that’s how we all learn to be better storytellers in this new medium.
And, by the way, I really appreciate your comments (and support).
Carisa
Carisa, thanks for this wonderful article. Highlighting indeed is not easy to implement and very, VERY time-consuming. I decided to use a bar that moves with the text for the Heidi apps, as it was easier to implement and feedback to that one is good so far, as it comes close to what children seem to use at school: a sheet of paper with a window that they move over the text.
This highlighting feature was all new to me, being German-speaking where highlighting is not normally used as words are pronounced exactly the way they are spelled.
A page guide on the other hand is easy to implement and I will keep highlighting and index in mind for future updates of my book apps!
Katrin, JustKidsApps
Thank you for your comments, Katrin! I have learned that it isn’t as easy as consumers of digital literature assume, to add certain features to digital, but these are two that really make a difference. I think any effort to highlight or underline words as they are spoken, in any language, can be helpful to literacy.
In particular, I am seeing a huge increase in the use of digital media for teaching a second language, like German, to English-speaking kids here in the US, so we appreciate your efforts! As a German-American myself, married to a French-American who was born in Mexico and is tri-lingual, this basic way to learn (either for the first time or as a second language), is really valuable to the over 50% of learners who are primarily visual.
This is really interesting. You should also check out http://www.p2games.co.uk, they have so many great apps for kids!
Great article, Carisa. I’m sending it off to my new publisher to be a target for our future digital books.
Chris, Purple Carrot Books
Hi, Carisa – thank you for the informative article, keep ‘em coming!
I’m involved in a project to produce a novel interactive, animated kids’ book: it will appear in multiple languages, a feature we expect to be popular in our native South Africa. We are based in Cape Town, and very much in touch with the many challenges in our education system – not least of which is the fact that we have eleven languages under one flag! We are considering permitting text and narration in two languages on a page at the same time, to help kids faced with a dual-medium environment.
Reades can monitor progress at http://www.indiegogo.com/miniature-polar-bear or at http://www.miniaturepolarbear.com.
Carisa,
I really enjoy your blog and am a huge fan of Digital Storytime. One app that does the matching with word very easily (even I can do this…!) is Story Creator, one of Alligator app free story telling apps. It does not provide pages on the apps but highlighting and reading word for word with audio is easily produced. I really enjoy this app which also allow unlimited books created in its library.
Just the thing for our students with special needs at school or home!
Carol from OT’s with Apps
Thank you so much for this recommendation, Carol. I love your reviews – great resource! I don’t review story creation apps or books inside bookstore apps (just due to my own limited time), but love the concept and way these apps encourage storytelling.
I will be volunteering in my son’s 1st grade class this year and will take a closer look at Story Creator. I have PictureBook, which is another favorite, especially the ‘school edition’, but so much creativity and connection to literacy through writing stories is something I really appreciate in an app.
Carisa
I agree that the recent additions to the OceanHouse media books in which you can now record yourself (and others) is a valuable and welcome addition to the already well produced series.
And I recognize that word highlighting is a desirable feature. I am not aware of what research there may be from reading specialists and linguists about the different effects that there may be in the various ways that such highlighting could be handled.
My intuition says that the way the Living Books from the 90s got it just right when blocks of words went yellow as the precious child actor read. The chunking seemed to follow very closely the voice delivery and breath work of the child narrating and reading it. (I still think the iOS port of the Mercer Mayer story Just Dad and Me is the single greatest children’s app on the market, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/just-me-and-my-dad-for-ipad/id364723303?mt=8)
My sense is that going word by word is often too much motion for a young eye and brain to follow meaningfully.