Publishing Digital Book Apps for Kids

Two key events are taking place this week for children’s app developers. First is the Dust or Magic App Camp on the Monterey Peninsula, where a variety of experts share best practices for making interactive media.

My research interest in self-publishing was further fueled by the industry’s tendency to dismiss it; insisting on the need for validation by a ‘proper publisher’.  Read On »

1.     We can’t see the full ‘data’ picture

2.     Digital = Publishing

3.     Walled Gardens Make Readers Claustrophobic

4.     We’re Not Sure How Much Is To Blame on Global Recession

5.     We’re still in Love with Print

6.     We Need To Understand Alternative Distribution Channels

7.     The Audience Wants to Interact – and what does this mean for IP?

8.     We’re Increasingly Enticed and then Freaked Out by Technology

9.     Brands See Value in Writers, While Publishers Can’t Always Monetize Content

10.  We Like Post-Digital Projects – but are they commercially viable?

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...

There is resistance to digital books for kids from many teachers and parents … and in many ways, librarians are no different than others who work closely with children. But there is a growing understanding in the library community that digital content is arriving in a big way, like it or not. And libraries, of all the traditional curators in print, are truly the ideal gatekeepers of quality kids digital content. Librarians are trusted, objective, skilled in evaluating content and part of a large network of potential curators. They are also very concerned about the impact of the digital shift on readers of all ages.

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.

Recently I had the pleasure of walking down memory lane when we added some new books to the Bookboard collection. I remember reading both the Berenstain Bear books and the Boxcar Children books as a child, but I always just accepted them as they appeared to be; stories about bears and children, respectively. Now, as a librarian, I look back on them and see more ...

We talk a lot about the iPad here on #storyappchat, but Android remains a powerhouse player in the mobile market, both in the U.S. and worldwide. So, what are the challenges when developing for And...

“Packaging a book is still the critical point where marketing and publicity begins,” remarked Lucinda Blumenfeld, the owner of Lucinda Literary, in her

This guide is the first of many to come to our latest section of the blog, Developer Central. We’ll be providing new content for developers of all skill ranges. In our first guest post, Chad Mureta of App Empire describes some of the intricacies of the app marketplace and how to leverage data for app success ...

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

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.