Publications about books for children and young adults
Big Nate: Comix by U! (based on the books by Lincoln Peirce; HarperCollins and Night & Day Studios, December) is a kind of Colorforms set for new media starring Nate Wright, a sixth-grade antihero who makes Greg Heffley look like a wimpy kid. In this app, Nate’s fans and budding playwrights press-and-place a variety of [...]
After wrapping up our March special issue on books in the digital era, a meeting about Horn Book web strategy, and another meeting to tour the virtual space that will host an upcoming SLJ event about YA books (this summer; I’ll keep you posted), I’m feeling completely pixelated. I recognize that I have an imagination [...]
Developer Nosy Crow just won a Publishing Innovation Award for their app-only fairy tale retelling Cinderella: A 3-D Fairy Tale (September). Like their Three Little Pigs, this digital interpretation has plenty of charm. The app’s “read to me” and “read and play” options are refreshingly narrated by a cast of British child actors, with dialogue [...]
If you’ve read any of Mo Willems’s books (or his Sutherland lecture “Why Books”), it will come as no surprise that his app Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App! (Disney, October) is kid-centric and slyly subversive. The friendly bus driver from Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! introduces a Mad Lib–like story starring [...]
As a Seuss fan, I had high hopes for The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories app (Oceanhouse Media, September). This adaptation of seven rediscovered stories (originally published by Redbook Magazine in the 1950s) ended up being a mixed bag. Here’s what I like about it: Reader control. The main menu features a separate listing [...]
We talked about this trend of shiny-ing up books last week when Martha P. and I did a Family of Readers gig at the Duxbury Free Library for the Westwinds Bookshop. I speculated that the books that would best survive digital competition would be those that most rewarded or required physical presence–airport novels out, picture [...]
SLJ Technology Editor Kathy Ishizuka reports on “Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America,” a new study by Common Sense Media revealing an “app gap”: inequities in access to digital devices due to household income. The question of app and ebook accessibility across economic classes came up several times in the Librarians and Digital [...]
On Wednesday night, Katie and I attended (virtually) Ruckus Media and SLJ’s Librarians and Digital Storytelling Twitter Party, a lively hour of fast-paced discussion on the practical uses of e-books and apps. Read Ruckus’s wrap-up (linked above) or relive the event at #ruckusslj on Twitter. Many thanks to our hosts for organizing and for the invitation to participate. The discussion provided much food for thought. Katie and I [...]
Welcome to the Horn Book’s new digital home; please take a look around. One of the things I like most about the new hbook.com is the ability it gives readers to engage in dialogue with us and each other; just about every post and article ends with a spot for you to tell us what you think. Please do so.
>TWU professor Sylvia Vardell and poet Janet Wong have collaborated to bring us PoetryTagTime, an ebook compilation of new poems for children. With Joyce Sidman, X.J Kennedy, and Jane Yolen among the thirty poets included, the organizing principle of the book is neat, with each poet “tagging” the next to write a poem which in [...]
