Results of the 2013 Cybils Book App Award Are In!

I was thrilled to take part this year in the final judging for the 2013 Children's and Young Adult Bloggers Literary Awards, otherwise known as the Cybils.

My fellow judges and I were handed a quite varied list of five short-listed titles, including two apps for the very young, Endless Alphabet and Wee You-Things, and two apps for a much older audience, To This Day and Cornelia Funke’s Mirror World.

But we all agreed that the standout app among the five was a gorgeously rendered and extremely intuitive app that is sure to appeal to the whole family, from pre-readers to grandparents, alike.

We therefore proudly offer the 2013 CYBILS Award for the Book App category to Disney Animated by Touch Press, the leader in book app design and production today, IMHO.

Here is the judges’ collective statement:

“Disney Animated brings to life the outstanding animation heritage of Disney Studios through the expertise of Touch Press, one of the most exacting and innovative developers in the app space today. Appealing to the entire family, Disney Animated meets all the criteria we seek in outstanding interactive media. The technical elements are impeccably rendered, the interactive elements are directly linked to the content, and the narrative content is endlessly fascinating. From stills to studies, animated shorts, soundtracks, interviews, and games that illustrate the points being made, you will have trouble putting this app down.

Disney Animated cries out to be revisited again and again, revealing new insights with each reading. Like any good non-fiction book, you can read this app in linear or non-linear fashion. It drives the reader to explore and experiment. Interactive workshops built into the app not only give hands-on explanations of how animation works, they challenge our understanding of physics in a game-like way. The app makes every use of the medium, animating just about everything, even the text! You can pinch, enlarge, move, examine and share just about everything in this app. What better way to discover animation than through animation itself, but powered by the reader!

With Disney Animated, Touch Press models what the digital environment is capable of and what a truly great book app can be.”

— Cybils 2013 Book App Judges

For more information on this year's Cybils honorees, head on over to our official website. There, you will find titles to keep you and your young readers happy and occupied with great content for a long time!
 

Big thanks to all the many volunteers -- judges, panelists, and organizers -- who made another successful Cybils year possible. And to Mary Ann Scheuer of GreatKidBooks for herding us all to the finish line!

Can't wait for next year, Mary Ann!

Transmedia and Crossmedia: One and the Same?

I just love my tète à tètes with Roxie Munro. We always seem to encourage one another to dig deeper, to think more clearly about what we are doing and who we are serving.

Our latest chat had us defining the terms "transmedia" vs. "crossmedia." We even threw in "multimedia" just to round out the discussion.

These terms seem to be used at times interchangeably, at other times to express entirely different things. Even at the Oct 2012 StoryDrive Conference on "Transmedia Storytelling" at the Frankfurt Book Fair, presentations flitted from creating story worlds to promoting content through subsidiary merchandising to everything in between.

Surely they can't all be one and the same?

So I did my homework -- read a bunch of books and attended a ton of workshops -- and I talked to a lot of people, including Roxie. And here's my take on how we should be using these terms...

Transmedia Storytelling is when a story exists on several platforms, BUT on each platform a different aspect of the story is being told. Taken together, all story strands create a story world, but each story can hold its own on its own. It can be a complete experience alone or become a broader experience as part of the greater whole.

Example: The Matrix. Three movies plus two official gaming environments plus several comic books. A particular character walks off screen in movie 1 and into the gaming world where more of the Matrix story is revealed and lives side-by-side movie 2, in which this character plays no role at all. Then, as if stepping out of the game world and back into the screen, she reappears in movie 3. That's transmedia storytelling, without question.

Crossmedia, on the other hand, is when you take a story, like Roxie's Doors or Beware Mme la Guillotine or The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore, and apply it, with some adaptions to fit the format, to another medium.

Roxie's Doors is a picture book and an app. The two are different products, obviously, and the creative content is treated differently in each, but the story is largely the same in both media.

Beware Madame la Guillotine is currently a storyapp and an interactive eBook and is in development as both plain-text eBook and dual-language print book. The purposes for each of these publications is slightly different as are their target audiences. But the story remains the story from format to format.

This is also true for Morris Lessmore. Though the animated short, storybook app, picture book, and augmented reality app all boast special elements thanks to the various capabilities of each medium in which the story resides, the story itself doesn't really change. There are no new story strands or plot lines or characters.

These are all fine examples of crossmedia storytelling, the purpose of which seems to be to get quality content to the reader/users where they most wish to enjoy it.

Multimedia, to round out this discussion, means using more than one medium in the same place, i.e., bringing multiple media to a single device. An interactive eBook wherein the main character accesses a particular YouTube selection, or sends a tweet or posts to Facebook is a prime example of multimedia storytelling if the videos and tweets and posts remain unchanging and essential to the storytelling in their proscribed form. If, however, the main character has his/her own twitter and FB accounts and is posting and tweeting outside the story, perhaps as a way to engage with fans and/or provide story clues or back-story, etc., that would be transmedia storytelling.

And then there is merchandising, which is not storytelling at all, thank you very much. It falls into none of the above categories. But is being referred to, wrongly, and by many, as "transmedia" or "crossmedia." (The same people also tend to use these two terms interchangeably. Again, in my opinion, wrongly.)

Example: Star Wars. You have the movies. Then you have the myriad books which tell different stories connected to the greater world, like what happened to Princess Leia and Han Solo. This is transmedia storytelling. But then you have the Princess Leia doll. That's merchandising. Then you have the book version of each movie: crossmedia. Then you have the game that takes you to some galaxy featured in the movies, but expands on the story of that galaxy to create a whole new story: transmedia.

What do you think? Have I got it right? Roxie?

This Week's Hat Tip: Featuring Susan Eaddy

This week's Hat Tip goes to Julie Hedlund and Susan Eaddy for their delightful picture book to be: My Love is the Sun.

Both Susan and Julie credit me for having brought them together. And while I can't deny introducing them one fateful day in 2012 at the Bologna Children's Book Fair, I can claim no credit for what they have accomplished as collaborators since that time.

It was Julie's genius to include Susan in her inspired hybrid publishing scheme to bring My Love is the Sun into this world. Their aim: to finance the production of this 24-page picture book with Little Bahalia Publishing through crowd-sourced donations raised via Kickstarter.

This post was meant to give the team's campaign a boost at the half-way point. Yet, they've pulled off the inevitable without my help, and in record time too! Their campaign, in less than two weeks, is already fully funded!

But that doesn't mean you can no longer lend your support. Oh no! There's still plenty of time to contribute to the campaign. And no donation is too small for this worthy effort.

Worthy? You ask. Well, just take a look at this video interview with the illustrator, Susan Eaddy, and decide for yourself!

I think you'll agree that this is one picture book that -- fo' sho' -- deserves to sit front and center on your child's bookshelf. Even mine. And she's already 17!

If you liked my interview with Susan then you will absolutely LOVE this quickie video of Susan at work birthing her fantastical clay beasties!

Click Here for more information about Julie and Susan's Kickstarter Campaign to raise production funds for My Love is the Sun in collaboration with Little Bahalia Publishing.

The 13th Annual Dust or Magic Institute: Magic-Making Factors #1-3

For 14 years, researchers, reviewers, and thought leaders in the world of interactive media for kids convene at Dust or Magic events to discuss, dissect, discern, and determine where the magic lies – and where it doesn’t – in digital products for youth.

They are helping to chart the way forward for our field, while providing tried-and-true advice to developers as to what constitutes developmentally appropriate learning tools for young people.

I was thrilled to be a part of the Institute for the first time this year.

The overarching goal of the Dust or Magic Institute, I quickly learned, is to define the factors that contribute to making child-focused interactive digital media – whether apps, games, TV, web-based tools and programs, eBooks or toys – worthy of our esteem or otherwise, that is: Magic or Dust.

Products are demoed, analyzed, and critiqued through the lens of childhood development, learning theory, and what can be considered educational play.

At Dust or Magic, the judgments aimed at today’s offerings are binary. But that’s not to say it's all clear-cut. For the world of children’s interactive media is in its infancy – the equivalent of the silent picture show days in the evolution of film – and what makes something “best in class” is changing all the time.

Factors that made magic even five years ago may tend toward dust today. As the devices (hardware) evolve, so must the software, and with it the content. As we learn more about what we can do with our tools, so too expand the myriad options that suggest what we can do with pictures, stories, words, and games to engage and educate young people and lay the foundation for lifelong learning.

Magic-Making Factors #1, #2, & #3

One conclusion we reached this year is that the earliest digital products sought to create one-to-one relationships with users, mirroring the experiences one might have with a book. Also like the book, these products tended to be linear.

Today, however, the strongest products succeed in bursting linear boundaries. They also encourage group experiences and empower users to jump off the screen and relate to each other and their environment.

This can be seen in the many offerings of Toca Boca that inspire creative parallel play among the pre-school set, the screen being their starting point. In Tinybops’ brilliant interactive exploration of the human body, aimed at an older audience, navigating through the app is anything but linear. The same can be said for most of the apps coming out of Touch Press, including their latest: Disney Animated. And Time Traveler Tours’ own innovative approach to educational tourism, in which the screen and story launch users into an exploration of their physical surroundings, was also validated.

The video above shows me demoing not just Beware Madame la Guillotine, but the Time Traveler Tours & Tales concept in general. We came out with a strong 7 out of 10. Pretty good for a first-timer at the Dust or Magic institute, don't you think?

I hope you’ll take a look at it and give us your rating.

Do you have any questions about Dust or Magic? Ask them in the comments. I’ll be happy to address them in future posts. Meantime, stay tuned. More #DustorMagic musings to come!

All best, Sarah

Tools of Change at Dust or Magic

It's conference time again and I'm off! This time to...

...the annual Institute of designers, researchers, and reviewers of interactive media (IM) for children and youth.

So stay tuned for blog posts from historic Lambertville, New Jersey, including:

• updates on the latest product releases and their use in schools;

• observations on the intersection between child development theory and emerging interactive teaching-and-learning tools;

• highlights on what's new in interactive design; and

• interviews with others who are passionate about the potential of interactive media for children

Meanwhile, I invite you to check out my blog post in O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing about the 3rd, and last, TOC Bologna Conference, where I met many of the fine folks who are the magic behind Dust or Magic.

Your comments welcome!