Publishing Digital Book Apps for Kids

The Total Tutor will interview Roxie Munro. She will discuss the 21st Century Children's Non Fiction Conference.
Author/illustrator of 35+ children’s books, including EcoMazes (SLJ Star, Smithsonian: Best Science Books for Children); Hatch!

When was the last time you updated your iTunes app (or iBook) description? It may seem like a no-brainer, but this blank canvas of text can help interested people get a better idea of what your app...

I’ve often wondered how my kids think about books. Both the digital book and the print book have always been a normal part of their bedtime routine. Those familiar arguments from e-book critics about the visceral experience of paper–the coarseness of wood pulp against one’s fingertips, the scent of library stacks–would seem utterly nonsensical to them. It is not a choice between print or e-books ...

If you’re a mobile developer, you know there are many challenges to getting your app to market. How will your app be used? Do you need a native mobile app, a mobile website or both? How do you design your app for multiple devices and platforms? And so on.

 

Even if you get your app to market, there’s no guarantee it will be successful. Consumers have millions of apps to choose from and the competition for user adoption is fierce. More than 60% of apps in the Apple App Store have never been downloaded and of those that have, one in four is abandoned after its initial use. A quality user experience can be the difference between one that’s successful and one that’s not.

 

In this infographic, we give you some simple steps you can do to make sure your mobile app is a hit ...

As I do more outreach and training for local teachers in my community, I am surprised at the large number of classrooms getting devices without any guidelines about how to integrate them into their existing institutional structures or curriculum. From these experiences, I have come up with the following five tips for starting a new program in any classroom …

This blog post is an excerpt from a case study that is available as a PDF download from Digital Book World. To download the entire case study, click here. In

No doubt the big news this week for the digerati, the surprise decision by Tim O'Reilly to 'shutter' the Tools of Change conference and cull the community. The decision did not play well within that community with strongly worded responses both from Porter Anderson and Brian O'Leary. The Bookseller's own Sam Missingham also nailed it on FutureBook describing its passing as "premature" ...

All of the Big Six publishers have, for the first time, agreed to make e-books available to public library users.

You might recognize Eli Noyes as the illustrator of Annie Fox's whimsical Raymond and Sheila books. He is also the writer/illustrator of a new story app called Ruff's Bone, available from Wanderful...

Should parents worry if pre-school children love fiddling with their smart phone? Recent research suggests touch screens suit the way children interact with the world and could benefit learning.

In ev’ry job that must be done 
There is an element of fun. 
You find the fun and snap! 
The job’s a game.

 

In the 1964 musical film “Mary Poppins,” all it takes is a snap of the nanny’s fingers and the toys march into the toy box, the clothes fold themselves, and the covers ripple up the beds. What the song argues, and the movie fails to show, is that for kids housework is indeed a game. My daughter likes nothing more than emptying the dishwasher (and then wheeling the lower basket around the room); my son stole the mini-broom from me almost every time that I took it out. Toca House, an iOS app from the Swedish digital play studio Toca Boca, understands the fun of these adult jobs ...

http://www.digitalkidsauthor.com/reading-fun It's in the Apple iTunes App Store, under the Books category where the book apps are, that you can find, interac...

Over two years ago, as one of my very first blog posts I wrote about the prices in the book app market, using my first 100 reviews for analysis. Now that I have reviewed over 700 titles in this new industry, I’d like to share a few of the points I made in 2011, which are still very much true … along with some stats to compare over time.

 

True today and even evident at the very beginning of this revolution in enhanced digital picture books was a tendency toward very low prices. If you compare these apps to other book-like products in the cultural environment, getting new releases for under $3 is rather unusual. However, this ‘sweet spot’ of $2.99 for eBooks is even more true today than two years ago, with over 70% of children’s book apps in our survey priced at $2.99 or less.

At every writers conference or self-publishing panel the question that almost always inevitably comes up is: “How much will self-publishing really cost me?”

 

Because the book publishing industry is one of the last industries to go digital, it’s going through a quick transition. As a result of this shift, authors no longer need to go through the traditional gatekeepers to publish high-quality books and are instead moving toward self-publishing. Launching a book is like launching a startup. Putting together a quality book involves not just writing it, but getting it edited, then formatted, designing a cover, and having a marketing strategy around it.

 

Below, I break down the costs of how much professional services will cost you for a high-quality book ...

The New York Times started to include ebooks in print and online editions back in 2011. The company announced today that it is suspending the inclusion of

This is a guest post by Ouriel Ohayon, co-founder and CEO of Appsfire.com an app discovery and marketing service.
All eyes on app discovery: suddenly, because of what happened to ...

For book publishers, apps are problematic. They're expensive and complicated to produce. The generally accepted price points are very low -- often too low to justify the investment necessary to build them.

Resource list of research reports and websites to evaluate and curate educational apps for kids under 12.

 

With more than 700,000 apps on iTunes alone, searching for a quality one for your kids can be overwhelming, to say the least. It can feel “like looking for a needle in a haystack, unless you have a few trusted and unbiased review sites to rely on,” says Carisa Kluver, a mom and founder of digital-storytime.com. These six independent review sites, run by parents or teachers, can offer guidance:

Amazon this morning updated its Kindle iOS app with support for Apple’s “VoiceOver” reading and navigation feature for blind and visually impaired users of the iPhone and iPad. Amazon says more than 1.8 million e-books will support the technology, which automatically reads aloud the words on the page.