When I first started thinking seriously about ebooks, which admittedly wasn’t very long ago, one of the first things that popped to mind was children’s books. Will they survive the inevitable emigration of mainstream publishing intact? Admittedly there’s
some pretty cool if not fancy psuedo ebooks out their for kids that have voice and flash animation. There’s interactive storybooks, and commercials masquerading as storybook games but mostly these are conversions of books with a little cut and paste done with the art work. Even so these are as much cartoon as book, and just like with learning tools such as Leapster, the activity they provide is simply not the same as sitting down and reading a book. It’s sort of sad our books already need animation for kids to read them.
Down the road we’re going to see electronic publishing technology take a real leap in delivered media. I’ll bet you John McCain’s thumbs that technology will steer towards medium integration with one format carrying more information. Just look at all the extra gear packed into mp3s now. I was fiddling around on my iPhone’s music player the other day and found lyrics scrolling along the cover art of a few songs. I think we’ll see more and more data packaged together like this for the user to do with as he or she pleases.
I won’t get into the messy disarray of electronic publishing formats that exists right now, as that is a whole swamp of an issue best left for other posts. But as we move forward I’d like to see the functionality slowly working its way into electronic texts to make it’s way to more graphic-oriented children’s books without having to choose between crappy pdf scans or bastardized books. In a world where we are quickly moving from bookshelves to devices, its a little unfortunate that we can’t easily place Goodnight Moon and Oliver Twist on the same virtual shelf.
