Appy Days

Digital developments in children’s publishing are now offering not only a complementary role to the printed word but potentially building audiences by engaging young readers in a variety of new and interactive ways. Kate Wilson explains why her company, Nosy Crow, will be publishing apps as well as books.

In February 2010, together with some colleagues, I announced the formation of Nosy Crow. Nosy Crow is a children’s publishing company. We will publish books for children between the ages of 0 and 14 and also apps that are reading experiences for children between the ages of 2 and 7.

What is an app?

‘App’ is short for ‘application’. An app is simply a little piece of stand-alone software. Over the last few years, it’s gained popularity as a word because Apple has used it extensively to describe software programmes developed for the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the iPad. They have created an app store for people who want to buy new features and new content for their phones. Apps can be and do lots of things. You could have an app that enabled you to manage your personal banking from your phone; tweet or connect to facebook; shop online; or count calories. You could also have an app that was a game, or a book, or a film, or something in-between.

The kind of apps we are talking about in this article, though, are for use on a touch screen device, like an iPad or an iPhone, and the way that you interact with them is to touch different bits of the screen to prompt different things to happen. You could, for example, on an app of a text-only book, touch the screen to move from one page to another.

Some apps are free. Some apps are cheap. Some apps are expensive.

While Apple is currently the most important bringer of touch-screen devices to the market, there are already many others, and the number and variety will grow.

Apps are, I think, important to publishing for two reasons: first, people have become increasingly reliant on phones and other electronic devices and want to use them to do more and more things; and second, because people seem to be willing to pay for apps, they are a way to sell content, which is important, because it has not really been possible for trade publishers (as opposed to publishers who publish for the business, scientific, technical, medical or educational communities) to sell web content.

So why apps?

From the moment I saw a touch-screen device – an iPod Touch – I was excited about the potential for apps to become reading experiences for children.

The first thing that struck me was the immediacy of the experience relative to other screen experiences: when you touch the screen, something happens. As adults, we have learned that we can make something happen on a screen by fiddling around with a mouse or a keyboard or a remote control. But if you showed a computer to someone from Shakespeare’s time, she wouldn’t touch the keyboard, but (when she’d got over her fear) would, I think, try to make something happen by touching the screen. If you type ‘toddler using an iPad’ into google, you’ll see two-year-olds using that device for the first time instinctively.

The second thing that struck me was how portable the devices were. I am a mother, and, when my children were little, I carried a huge bag that contained, as well as snacks and wet-wipes and a change of clothes, toys and at least five board or picture books. I realised that you could store hundreds of books in this tiny thing: an iPhone is approximately 12 centimetres by 6 centimetres by 1 centimetre.

The third thing that struck me was how lovely the screen looked, and how beautiful colours looked on it. The backlighting that many people find annoying when they read texts on screen meant that colour images were lit up like little stained-glass windows.

And the fourth thing that struck me was that, now these things were in the world, they were unlikely to go away.

At The Bookseller’s Children’s Conference in September 2010, Justine Abbott, from Aardvark Research, shared some of her research about young children’s engagement with digital media.

She talked about the fact that 28% of children under six have a television in their own rooms.

She said that pre-schoolers in her survey were watching television for over two hours per day.

She said that the youngest iPad user she’d met was four months old.

She quoted the mother of a 20-month-old son saying ‘he’ll probably learn to read from the computer’.

She said that parents welcomed iPhones as ‘electronic Mary Poppinses’, providing interactive and engaging entertainment for their children without their intervention.

She concluded by saying that families were increasingly embracing screen-based technology as entertainment for their child, saying it was ‘portable, personal and (importantly) permissible’.

I know that many people reading this article will be shaking their heads in sorrow or horror at Justine Abbott’s statements, and would, I know, recoil from the other statistical evidence that children are spending less time with print and more with screens and that their parents and teachers are letting them or encouraging them to do so.

But what are we to do? We could turn our back on the evidence, and say it is nothing to do with us, and keep our focus on print. Or we could try to ensure that some of that screen-time is reading time.

At Nosy Crow, we love books. We love the smell of them. We love the feel of them. We love the way that everything changes when you turn a page. Some of the books we will publish really have to happen on the printed page: they are very physical things. There are touch-and-feel elements throughout the Noodle books illustrated by Marion Billet that we will publish in May 2011. There are illustrations for the reader to complete with their own pens and pencils in the Mega Mash-up books by Nikalas Catlow and Tim Wesson that we publish in February 2011. And there are good, old fashioned paperbacks like S C Ransom’s romantic fantasy Small Blue Thing, published in January 2011, and beautifully produced picture books like Axel Scheffler’s Pip and Posy titles that are published in April 2011.

But, while we love books, we love reading more. And we profoundly believe in the potential for literacy and, specifically, reading for pleasure, to transform lives. We know that reading for pleasure correlates with increased attainment in reading and writing; that reading for pleasure fosters creativity and imagination; that reading for pleasure develops good social attitudes; that reading for pleasure contributes to knowledge and understanding of the world and that reading for pleasure contributes to self-esteem. We don’t just make this stuff up. These are the conclusions of decades of research: PIRLS 2007; Cox and Guthrie 2001; Meek, 1987; Allen et al 2005; Bus et al, 1995; Stanovich and Cunningham, 1993; Hatton and Marsh, 2005; Pressley 2000.

I’ve just come back from speaking at a children’s publishing conference in Munich: Wie digital wird das Kinderbuch? (How digital will children’s books become?). There the statistics presented about German children’s embrace of technology were just as overwhelming, but several publishers there were advocating a softly-softly approach: let’s make apps, but let’s not make them too different from books. Let’s keep the book, but have it appear on the screen. Let’s not get into competition with computer games and animated films.

That’s not what I think we, as publishers, should do.

I think that this route risks making reading less exciting to children. If games and books exist in the same screen space, the comparison between the two will be made. If something happens – a noise, a movement – when you touch the iPad screen when you are playing a game, won’t you feel disappointed if nothing much happens when you are reading a book?

Telling a story in this new medium

I think that, as publishers, we shouldn’t be trying to squash the books that already exist onto a phone. We should, I think, be creating reading experiences for touch-screen devices. The devices have the capacity for sound, animation and interactivity built into them, and we should use those capacities to tell stories in a new and engaging way.

We’re trying to do just that. If you go onto YouTube and search Nosy Crow, you will find a video of the first of our 3-D Fairy Tales: The Three Little Pigs. It has text and it has illustrations, but it also has an audio track, and animation. When you touch the characters, they move, and you get additional comments. You can make the wolf blow down the house. You can explore the picture, and, when you tip the device backwards and forwards, the images look as if they are in 3-D.

Making this app, and working on the others that we are developing, has used many of the skills we already had: shaping text, determining pacing and choosing illustrations. We have had to learn new skills too, some of them purely technical, but many of them about how to tell a story in this new medium.

We think that, for us and for the people we have worked with, the process has been exciting. But what is important is that we’ve ended up with a reading experience that is engaging, fun, scary, funny, worthy of repeating – in the same way that a good book is all those things.

We shouldn’t turn our back. We shouldn’t go a little way down the digital path or do it half-heartedly and with reluctance. We should, I think, go to where our readers are going, and make sure that they read along the way.

Kate Wilson is Managing Director of Nosy Crow publishing, For further information see www.nosycrow.com