LIES. My profile page indicates that I have submitted 45 corrections since last June, and not a single one has had its status move beyond “submitted.” I’m guessing “report content error” is just one of those feel-good buttons. I did find a funny mistake, though, and thought I would share it with you since Amazon is ignoring my calls. From the Kindle edition of Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star:

“all [Zarathustra] taught was understanding the earthly elements, the turn of the year, the one God. And three simples rules to live by: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Also a belief in the purifying nature of ire, which was central to the faith and a symbol of the Almighty.”

FIRE, you heathens.

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SLJ’s Kathy Ishizuka links to a recent study

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But Pam couldn’t help with my question and maybe somebody here can. I’m reading the novel on my Kindle, which makes skimming pretty much impossible, so I don’t know how to go back and check this: it seemed to me that Anna was all restraint and longing gazes with Vronsky, and all of a sudden she’s pregnant. At least, sometimes she’s pregnant, and sometimes she seems to forget. Who’s the father? Am I not reading carefully enough? Was Tolstoi wanting us to read between the lines? Should I stay away from free Kindle books?

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But as a librarian, I understand that digital reference sources, done right, have it all over print. The online Britannica is no less authoritative, arguably more so because it is more quickly updated than print. It’s still browsable and inspiring of serendipity: having secured a trial subscription for the purposes of writing this editorial, I’m having trouble keeping myself on task. Wikipedia without shame! Less expensive (given you have the means to access it, which is a big given) than print and more compact—what’s not to like?

Here is the question for children’s book people, though. Does the thought of a kid whizzing his or her way around an electronic reference source give us as much satisfaction as the picture of a kid doing the same thing with a printed book? I thought not. Whether librarian, teacher, publisher, or writer, when we say that at least part of our shared goal is to promote the “love of reading,” what we have always meant is the “love of books.” (Some books.) What will our goal be once books no longer provide our common core?

This is partially a question about e-books. Yes, e-books are books, and libraries want to buy them and enthusiastically promote their circulation to library patrons, who demonstrably want to read them. But publishers complain that they need “friction” to ensure that library borrowing doesn’t take too much of a bite from consumer purchases, and libraries are put into the position of licensing rather than acquiring e-books, just another borrower in the chain. However, this economic tussle is only an early warning sign of the real problem that librarians and (as Stephen Roxburgh argued in the March/April 2012 Horn Book) publishers face: thanks to the leveling power of the internet, electronic literature doesn’t need either one of us, at least as we currently understand our respective missions.

But this is also a question about the independence of readers. In libraries, even those kids who wouldn’t talk to a librarian if their lives depended on it rely far more than they know on the professional expertise provided by the library’s staff, systems, and policies. Readers’ advisory is found as much in the shelving as it is in a friendly chat. When we are reading online, however, we are far more on our own, for good (we can read what we want when we want it) or ill (finding what we want to read can be an adventure beset by false leads, commercial interests, and invasions of privacy).

What can children’s book people become? I reveal my fantasy of what we could make of the future on page 16 of this issue, but in reality what we need to do is to redefine our gatekeeping role. Along with giving up any notion that the only real reading is book reading, like the online Britannica we have to believe in our own expertise and convince others that our knowledge is worth attending to. We’ve spent more than a century dedicated to the idea that some reading is better than other reading, an elitist position we can defend by pointing to decades of excellence in books for youth. Publishers and librarians together, we made that happen. Let us continue to do so.

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What apps and ebooks are you sharing with your children, students, or young library patrons?

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PRESCHOOL

A Present for Milo by Mike Austin (Ruckus Mobile Media)
Kitten Milo chases a mouse until they reach—surprise!—a birthday party. Clever interactive elements and crisp sound effects accentuate the cleanly drawn pictures and simple text.

The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton (Boynton Moo Media/Loud Crow Interactive)
This adaptation honors the original board book while adding just the right amount of pizzazz with smart interactivity, Billy J. Kramer’s soothing narration, and gentle background music.

Spot the Dot by David A. Carter (Ruckus Mobile Media)
In this concept-learning app, users search for colored dots hidden in increasingly complex, kaleidoscopic screens of bright shapes.

Freight Train by Donald Crews (Curious Puppy)
Like the book, this app offers a simple, logical presentation of concepts; users explore many-hued train cars (each with a different purpose) to reveal cargo, staff, and stock.

Peekaboo Forest by Charley Harper (Night & Day Studios)
Part concept book, part game, this app reconfigures wildlife artist Harper’s work into a series of seasonal forest settings. Touch a peeking-out tail or ear to reveal a forest creature and its name.

Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt (Random/Smashing Ideas, Inc.)
Inspired by the lift-the-flap classic, this app for offers new opportunities to play with Paul, Judy, and Bunny. Perky, clear instructions help pre-readers navigate the retro-illustrated activities.

The Monster at the End of This Book by Jon Stone; illus. by Michael Smollin (Callaway Digital Arts/Sesame Workshop)
Grover, attempting to contain the “monster” lurking at story’s end, tempts readers to explore. The frantically animated muppet, spot-on narration, and humorous sound effects add to the fun.

PRIMARY

Cinderella: A 3-D Fairy Tale (Nosy Crow)
The familiar tale is enhanced with cheeky humor, child narrators, and thoughtful interactivity. A friendly robin suggests interactive opportunities, plays hide-and-seek, and offers commentary.

The Three Little Pigs: A 3-D Fairy Tale (Nosy Crow)
This retelling is faithful to the traditional tale while adding a few original touches. The interactive features are clever, and the narration by child readers refreshingly unaffected.

Pop-Out! The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (Loud Crow Interactive)
Potter’s original text and illustrations are re-imagined as a digital pop-up book, with characters animated by tabs and wheels. Interactivity contrasts cheekily with gentle narration and music.

Wild About Books by Judy Sierra; illus. by Marc Brown (Random/Smashing Ideas, Inc.)
Witty rhyming text (with lots of interactive opportunities) tells how a bookmobile librarian got a zoo hooked on reading. Apparent three-dimensionality of the scenery and animals adds bounce.

Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App! by Mo Willems (Hyperion/Small Planet Digital)
Users fill in gaps in a Mad Lib–like narrative to create their own Pigeon stories. Record your own plot points and play them back, save stories to revisit, and follow a Pigeon-drawing tutorial.

When I Grow Up by Al Yankovic; illus. by Wes Hargis (Bean Creative)
Billy discusses his many (mostly improbable) career options. Weird Al’s own excellent narration enhances the text; interactive opportunities include games based on Billy’s potential professions.

INTERMEDIATE

Shake & Make! by Ed Emberley (Night & Day Studios)
Shake your device to break a simple image by artist Emberley into its component shapes, then recreate it by repositioning the pieces. A nice introduction to Emberley’s geometric illustrations.

Big Nate: Comix by U! by Lincoln Peirce (HarperCollins and Night & Day Studios)
Customize familiar characters (each in several poses and two sizes), templates, settings, props and speech-balloon options to create original Big Nate comics; then save and share.

Roxie’s A-MAZE-ing Vacation Adventure by Roxie Munro (OCG Studios)
Sixteen screens make up a gigantic maze through cities, farms, and wilderness full of tiny, animated vignettes. Along the way, users search for hidden numbers, letters, and objects.

OLDER

Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony  and Rodrigo Corral (Penguin)
This “enhanced ebook” tells the story of piano prodigy Gloria “Glory” Fleming’s disappearance through interactive photos, video clips, drawings, music, sound effects, internet chats, and ephemera.

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The first coverage I can remember us giving to e-publishing was back in 1997, when Sarah Ellis examined the digital reading experience via a Bjarne Reuter book that was available only via email or as a series of webpages on Dutton’s website. My favorite line: “I curled up in an armchair, and for the first time ever I actually put my laptop on my lap.”

Is anyone else getting device fatigue? I never thought I could have too many Apple things but, with my recent acquisition of an iPhone, I do. I feel like my trusty iPod puts on the Sad Mac look every time I put her in my briefcase while that shiny trollop iPhone nestles next to my heart.

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As the articles in this special issue on “Books Remixed” demonstrate, books, reading, and readers are always changing, both definitionally and individually, as an original text is transformed across media and its readers become viewers, listeners, players, and co-authors in the experience of story. Does Dead End in Norvelt remain the same book? Gantos’s words don’t change, but my reading does. At the Horn Book we are free and easy with ARCs, bending, marking, (sometimes) throwing them. A finished book becomes part of our library, and we treat them better: we’ve liked it enough to keep it. An e-book, at least for me, is always competing with the dozens of other books on my iPad as well as the ready temptations of the web and of electronic Scrabble. It’s like you have the whole world in your hands, and while God might have had no trouble staying on task, I do. Beyond that, we dismiss generations of work by type designers if we think those do-it-yourself typeface choices (basically, bigger and smaller) and standard screen sizes don’t affect our reading. I direct readers to Jon Scieszka and Molly Leach’s article “Design Matters” (HBM March/April 1998; www.hbook.com/1998/03/creating-books/design-matters) in which they showed us that

And beyond design and device—delivery. If you asked people at the Midwinter conference of ALA in Dallas this January what they thought might win the Newbery Medal that weekend, you got a variety of opinions. But if you even so much as mentioned e-books, you heard a concerted earful about OverDrive and Amazon and the Big Six publishers, and the difficulty—nay, impossibility—of getting these players to deliver digital books to school and public libraries in a just and efficient manner. Fair enough and true enough, but not nearly far enough. Local libraries will need to redefine themselves as location ceases to matter. Publishers (and reviewers!) will need to stretch their competencies or become satisfied with a smaller piece of pie. Reading isn’t going anywhere, but the current revolution in how people read is only a harbinger of the change in what people will be reading as the digital realm evolves its own idea of literature.

•   •   •

FYI: Several of the articles in this issue will, as usual, also be available online, but this time they will feature enhancements such as embedded videos (it is a special issue on media, after all). Visit us at www.hbook.com.

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Our goals for the project were as follows:

1. Create a child-centered app that would be played again and again.

2. Deliver enjoyable interactions with an educational component, excellent music, and surprises.

3. Promote the author and his books; remain true to the author’s vision.

4. Experiment and learn about the business models and about the creative process.

We chose Freight Train for several key reasons. It is an award-winning picture book with sales of more than a million copies. The art is simple and clean and would translate beautifully to the small screen. The subject matter is perfect for the intended audience. The book is linear (it literally moves along one track), so translating to the app experience was possible without creating additional art or files. We could see much potential for interactivity. There was well-known age-appropriate music in the public domain that we could use to enhance the experience for kids. We also had a Spanish version of Freight Train, so we would be able to make the app in two languages. We were further fortunate because Don had created Inside Freight Train (2001), a novelty board book featuring pages that slid open to reveal the contents of the freight cars, so we already had great additional art to use.

Step One: The Editors’ Storyboards

The first thing we did was to storyboard the app as sequential screens. We imagined interactions, sounds, and movement. We thought about the pacing and how we were going to keep kids engaged and surprised. Freight Train (the book) has two distinct parts—the introduction of the cars, before the train moves, and the pages showing the train moving through the landscape. This was a challenge, because we realized that the interactions would primarily happen in the first half of the app. The second half of the app would basically be a movie. We trusted that the magic of the book’s pacing would translate to the app format. We showed our storyboards to several developers and chose a developer who shared our vision.

Step Two: Don’s Storyboard

After we had a developer on board, Don brought his own ideas to the process and refined the rough editorial storyboards for the developer. He also weighed in on music, sound effects, and design.

Step Three: The Developer

Our developer then created detailed storyboards, told us what was possible technically (and what was not), suggested revisions, and encouraged us to move away from the book in order to deliver more interesting interactions, such as an addictive game featuring a mechanical scoop kids could manipulate to load and unload the cargo in the gondola car. But Don opted to remain true to his original work at all times, resisting a suggestion, for example, to introduce an animated opening sequence featuring music and the moving train—it was important that the train move only after the parts had become a whole and the concept of moving had been introduced in the text. We then started the time-consuming (and often frustrating) process of reviewing and approving “screens” one at a time, on our desktop computers—a very different experience from playing with the app on a mobile device!

We decided to create a soundtrack of four railroad songs to play throughout the app. Our conclusion in-house was that music was an important component to the app experience for preschoolers, and we were determined to make the music great. All the songs are new recordings for this app, including one original, extremely catchy song (we sang it here in the office a lot) that the developer wrote for us. But it turns out that seamlessly integrating four songs, regardless of what the user is doing at any point, is quite complicated. Don approved the voices and the music—and even listened in, via a conference call, on one recording session to make sure the tempo and vocal quality was just right. (I don’t think I’ll ever forget that editorial experience!)

MAKING the Freight Train app was rewarding, challenging, exciting, and a true high point of my life as an editor to date. It was thrilling to be a pioneer of sorts—along with Don and colleagues at Harper and Greenwillow—but also enormously frustrating. We were learning as we went, and we were ambitious. The fact that the text and songs had to be translated into Spanish chewed up the memory, making two apps essential. Thus we found ourselves making every change/adjustment/test twice along the way. We adopted new Adobe technology during the build process in hopes of making the memory and art rendering issues disappear. Then Apple rejected the use of that software when we were just two weeks from submission. Our timing was off! We were too far along (and it was too costly) to retro-fit for the iPad launch, so iPad resolution is not perfect and we had to field complaints and deal with confusion about that as well as miss out on some great publicity opportunities. Collaboration between author/editor/art director/digital publisher/developer was new ground for everyone, and complicated. Things that I took for granted for years as a book editor turned out not to be the case here. I’m proud of the Freight Train app, and so is Don. But if a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it? Letting people—a lot of people—know that an app exists is a big challenge.

DESPITE the challenges, Freight Train, with more than a million copies in print, now exists as a hardcover, a board book, a big book, a paperback, a bilingual edition, in multiple foreign editions, as a digital edition with music, and as an app. It was originally published in 1978. And it doesn’t show its age. Now that’s a picture book!

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