storybook apps | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Teen Read Week Giveaway #4: Reckless and Fearless by Cornelia Funke

And it’s time for another Teen Read Week giveaway! This time we have the first two volumes in Cornelia Funke’s Mirrorworld series, Reckless (in paperback) and Fearless (in hardcover), both reviewed here. While Funke is widely known for her children’s books (and especially for Inkheart)he Mirrorworld books are dark fantasy and meant for older teens. Jacob Reckless is able to travel back and forth between our world and an alternate, highly detailed fantasy world through a mirror he discovers in his father’s study. There is an incredible app based on these two books as well, also highly detailed and with truly amazing additional content written specifically for it (unfortunately, there’s no Android version). That, I can’t give away. But if you love fantasy or Dungeons and Dragons, you can easily get lost in Funke’s Mirrorworld. There’s a free preview of Reckless for Kindle, if you want to try it out and see if it’s for you. Leave a comment telling me what you’re going to be for Halloween this year and these could be yours!

The Transmedia Trend: Scholastic Jumps on the Bandwagon

The translation of storytelling across multiple media that creates this has a name- transmedia. And publishers are starting to recognize that this is a trend that they need to pay attention to. There have been a fair number of apps that have created interactive versions of books (The Monster at the End of This Book is a huge favorite here) and there are “read to me” ebooks, which my kids also like, but mainstream children’s publisher Scholastic looks to be taking things a step further.

Publishers Weekly reports that Scholastic is partnering with Ruckus Media to create an imprint called Scholastic Ruckus. Not only will this imprint produce interactive storybook apps, but it will provide digital content concurrently with the publication of children’s books (as opposed to having the digital content be “after the fact”), and it will create transmedia properties- a variety of versions of a story told across multiple platforms, which will include not just print copies, but film, gaming, online formats, and other interactive media experiences. I like that Scholastic is embracing this trend and will be interested to see what comes out of the new imprint. But Scholastic is a children’s publisher and so now we will have a generation of kids that expect a lot more from storytelling than what they can see on the printed page. Will it limit their imaginations to have other people’s visions of their reading experience surrounding them , or will it expand them? I don’t know. I can tell you this though: in spite of how exciting I think immersive experiences and transmedia can be, I’ll take the printed page (and the occasional live performance) any day.