I received the following email from von Heijne: My name is Nils and I'm contacting you about the launch of uTales, set to revolutionize children's picture books globally. We're a new world of digital picture books for kids, created by a worldwide community of more than 1,000 professional authors and illustrators. uTales is a truly disruptive concept, and I thought it perhaps may be of interest for you and your readers? The uTales community brings parents and children unlimited access to an entire library of digital picture books - a library that just keeps growing and...

It’s now well known that Kindle Fire has fired up the tablet market. Kindle Fire can be used for color magazines, newspapers, movie, music, web browsing etc. However, Amazon seems also developing reading contents exclusively for Kindle FIre. As an example, Amazon is promoting Kindle Fire as a eBook reader for children. In fact Amazon is developing some childrens’ ebook specially designed for Kindle Fire. It’s not known what would be the format of the ebooks, and how those ebooks will be deliverd to Kindle Fire. It seems a new Kindle reading application for Kindle Fire is on it’s...

From the press release: Scholastic SCHL -2.27% , the global children's publishing, education and media company, today announced a partnership agreement with Sourcebooks, a leading independent publisher, to offer their children's titles through the Scholastic proprietary distribution channels as e-books on the new Scholastic e-reading application launching this fall. Under the agreement, Scholastic will carry bestselling frontlist and backlist children's titles published by Sourcebooks on the Scholastic e-reading app which is specially designed to captivate kids while helping them become better readers. Picture books, elementary series,...

I have fond recollections of a particular series of children’s books with shiny foil spines. I expect anybody of my generation, those since, and probably several before do as well. Little Golden Books are some of the first books a child will ever read. Those books helped me win a prize for reading 104 books in a month in Kindergarten—I have little doubt most of those books were Little Golden ones. Of course, now that the younger generations are enthralled by portable electronic, Little Golden Books have to change with the times as well. Random House is releasing digital...

Back in June, Apple introduced a new iBook feature it calls Read Aloud, which is similar to Nook's Read to Me feature in that it provides a human voice narration that syncs to the onscreen text. In both commercial cases, the feature is meant primarily for children's books. Now Apple has updated its iBookstore Assets Guide to include instructions on how to add a Read Aloud narration track to your EPUB file. You can't access the latest guide unless you're a registered iTunes Connect member, but eBookNewswer has printed part of the relevant section: "You can create a Read Aloud book...

The publishers' long-running line of early childhood reading books, featuring characters such as the Berenstain Bears, Frog and Toad, and Splat the Cat, have been converted into digital versions with professional narration and word highlighting. The ebook editions are only avaiable through Apple and Barnes & Noble. Here's more info from their press release: HarperCollins Children's Books announced today the launch of the I CAN READ program on Apple's iBookstore and Barnes & Noble's NOOK Bookstore. I CAN READ is the first complete early reader program available digitally, with eighty titles out now and many more to come. I CAN READ...

BoingBoing today carried posts about a pair of books that haven’t been able to find publishers and so are going self-published. Although both originate in the UK, one of them couldn’t find a UK publisher because UK publishers thought Americans would find the book offensive, and the other couldn’t find an American publisher because the American publishers thought most Americans would not be interested. The first book is a children’s book by Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson about a pear tree that was damaged in the 9/11 terrorist attack and brought back to life by relief workers as a...

According to The Bookseller: Intellectual property agency 1454 has developed a new interactive children's adventure series that will be published exclusively on the Kindle worldwide. It is thought to be the first time a children's series has been produced solely for digital release. BookSurfers, written by the children's writer David Gatward, is aimed at nine to 12-year-olds and is based on the classic novels Treasure Island and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The four Booksurfers, Ryan, Jake, Becca and Harriet use a bespoke digital gadget called The Nautilus to jump into classic adventure stories with the reader able to use hyperlinks to connect to...

There is no question for me that children's books are the premier application for iPad apps in the reading area. I just couldn't resist reprinting this press release, it brings back too many memories: Random House Children’s Books (www.randomhouse.com/kids), announced today that the pat the bunny (www.rhkidsapps.com/patthebunny) interactive app is now available in the iTunes® store. Developed in collaboration with leading digital media agency Smashing Ideas, the universal app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch is based on Dorothy Kunhardt’s touch-and-feel children’s book classic. When pat the bunny was originally published in 1940, it was groundbreaking in its use of...

From the press release: WingedChariot, a pioneer in digital picture books, today announces plans to make its award winning multi-lingual apps for the webOS and the new HP TouchPad. Neal Hoskins, publisher at WingedChariot says: I have long admired the polish and beauty of webOS. With HP rolling out a whole ecosystem of devices running the webOS we'd love our rich and colourful children's stories to be available to HP customers. We look forward to bringing a new look and feel to our story apps on HP's webOS and to exploring the links between digital and...

From the press release: WingedChariot is the latest digital partner for Walker as part of an ongoing digital development strategy. WingedChariot, already known for its pioneering work in the digital picture book publishing arena, will work with Walker to produce interactive apps based on Walker's award-winning, best-selling children’s book properties. Both Walker and WingedChariot share a commitment to quality storytelling, multi-lingual narrative and the importance of combining language and play. This innovative partnership will allow both partners to work together to create the very best in picture book apps. Neal Hoskins, digital publisher at...

Long before Harry Potter, there was another young-adult series about teenaged wizards. Diane Duane began her “Young Wizards” series in 1980 with the novel So You Want to Be a Wizard, an exciting adventure about a pair of bookish, unpopular-at-school teens who discover they can do magic and proceed to save the universe together. To this day, I wonder how I managed to miss that book in my voracious middle and high school reading years. It, and its first sequel Deep Wizardry (1985) should have been around, and High Wizardry (1990) came out when I was a junior in high...