Scroll-Motion Brings Recordable Audio Feature to Kids' eBooks

The new world of eBooks is emerging sector by sector, as we’ve noted here previously, with innovations often tailored to specific audience segments.

Over the past week, Scroll-Motion, one of the leaders in producing e-Books for iPhones, announced it is launching 30 new children’s titles in a new format, “Iceberg Reader Kids.”

“This is a fully interactive way of engaging a book filled with activities like image exploration, DIY audio book recording, and a whole new set of interactive controls for moving through a book that are built with fun in mind,” the company’s co-founder Josh Koppel told Publishers Weekly.

The new platform includes many of the types of enhancements that seem particularly well-suited to kids’ books, features like animations, audio content, and interactive tools, including, notably, a recordable audio feature.

With this feature, parents or grandparents can record themselves — or the child — reading the books. This is the first such application for an iPhone, and it seems likely to usher in similar offering from competitors, some of which are reportedly also working on recordable audio technologies.

It’s not hard to imagine that families will love the opportunity to create unique family editions of classics like Curious George. It also strikes me that there may be an educational market here, among pre-school and elementary school teachers searching for new ways to help children become better readers.

To me, the new Scroll-Motion platform illustrates some of the vast potential of eBooks to transform the way we think of books, and the way we use them.

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