Book Apps

                                                        
I am an educationist and my experience as a curriculum developer and administrator for educational institutions led me on a path to develop book-reading worshop-modules incorporating fiction/nonfiction books as the bases of teaching-learning process instead of dry, prosaic academic readings. My book presentations entail power point presentations, maps, documentaries and music downloads along with excerpts from relevant books. Sometimes I share my insights and critical appraisals of books with book lovers on different platforms – colleges, art galleries, libraries and book reading clubs. The journey through these book reading workshops keeps me abreast of the latest in the book publishing world in India and abroad.
New book formats have become part of our reading lives, and they simultaneously create opportunities and challenges to my reading workshops. The e-book has segued into book apps since the launch of  ipad in 2009. It sent the publishers and developers into a tizzy and created app space to redesign, create and develop books in an avant-garde  fashion.  It’s a much more collaborative process and it’s hard to look at any of the apps and say ‘this person made that’… it requires an input from many a different disciplines. The cozy relationship of a writer and his book is replaced by artists, animators, designers and storytellers and their book app.

The London Olympics created a stir with their spectacular preparations and execution. The news doing the rounds in the book world was the Heuristic’s award-winning London: A City through Time which challenged our interpretation of a ‘book’. Taking as its basis Pan Macmillan's London Encyclopedia, the app packed in a simple design and a scrolling menu which navigates 6,000 articles about places, people and events from the city's history. There are panoramas of the city, rare photographs, video documentaries, a timeline and audio tours. The app is not linear like a book and one can tour places and events from links on the map. Indeed a fascinating guide to an amazing city and is well-worth investigating.

 Touch Press is one of the developers that is exploring how books can be reinvented for the iPad. Previous titles, Solar System and Gems and Jewels, have taken coffee table books and re-engineered them for tablet devices. Touch Press has moved away from non-fiction and has renewed its partnership with publishers Faber to try out some poetry. A new app compiled Shakespeare's 154 sonnets and it costs about the same as a decent printed book. But it goes far beyond what could ever be achieved in print and after a few hours of playing with it you'll feel that £9.99 is a bargain. Central to the app are the 154 video readings of the sonnets read by great actors, which is a wonderful thing and the readings here are a delight.
Touch Press experimentation with T.S Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’ was very impressive. There is the poem itself and detailed, informative line-by-line notes which will help students and anyone who wants to understand the work in more depth. Beyond that, there are six readings of the poem, including two by Eliot himself and an excellent one by Sir Alec Guinness, a picture gallery and a facsimile of Eliot’s original manuscript.
One of the most interesting areas in book-apps right now is the one aimed at the children, as publishers blur the boundaries between books, games, animation and creative software. The handling of a book is difficult for a very young child. They have to know how to turn pages, and have to manipulate this thing, whereas with a tablet, you don’t need to work a mouse, or know the concept of folders.  There is a direct relationship between the child and the app or the digital book, and it is manipulateable with tremendous ease. That causes delight not just for the child but the parent, too. There’s a challenge for publishers here though. Books have been designed to be read with or by parents, so while it’s important to create book-apps that are engaging and fun, it would be a shame if that came at the expense of the emotional value of the book: of the parent and child sitting together. The answer could lie with writers and artists who also understand the fundamentals of interactive design. “Those are going to be the new children’s book rock stars!”
Me Books is the digital equivalent of an independent picture-book shop, which is trying to help parents who are struggling to filter the sheer number of book-apps available on iOS."It should be exactly like going into a little picture-book shop where you trust the guy who runs it, and know the stuff he's selling is good.The key feature of Me Books is its "draw and record" feature, where children can draw an area on-screen – a "hotspot" – and then record their own sounds or words for it.
That may sound minor, but in the Peppa Pig and Ladybird Me Books apps, it was enormously popular where they invent their own zebra calls or insist that visitors to the house record their own take on Daddy Pig. In the future, we'd really love the notion of people being able to save, swap and share versions of the stories, both with other people that have the app and the ability and to send your version of The Three Little Pigs to grandparents.
As children grow into their teens and tweens, they’re becoming much more immersed in interactive content, particularly video games, where there is a nonlinear world that they’re getting to explore. The challenge for the publishing industry, then, is to tell stories in the way that these teenagers are used to and want to receive them.
I have shared my exploration through my smart phone and the internet with my readers. In fact rereading the write-up, it is more of what a reader would find on the net. I have bunched in all the relevant detailing on the net to take you through the new world of book reading. What delighted me no end was the fact that my book reading workshops are very much on the lines of the book apps designed by Touch Press, where-in I take the audience through virtual tours of settings in the book, the historical, social, and political backdrop of the book, pictures and maps of architecture, paintings and designs in the book – besides deciphering the plot and literary study of the technique and themes in the book. My most delightful experience so far has been ‘An Equal Music’, written by Vikram Seth in which I made the audience listen to all the five pieces of European Classical Music woven in the story of the book, with an added tour of the geography and artistic musical theatres in London, Vienna and Venice.
Do come to one of my LIVE BOOK APP READINGS in the forthcoming months!