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Living Books is a series of interactive read-along adventures aimed at children aged 3—9. Two decades after the original release, the series was re-released by Wanderful Interactive Storybook for iOS and Android.
The series began in as a Broderbund division that started with an adaptation of Mercer Mayer 's Just Grandma and Me. The company continued to publish titles based on popular franchises such as Arthur , Dr. Seuss , and Berenstain Bears. Broderbund was acquired by The Learning Company formerly SoftKey , Mattel Interactive , and The Gores Group over the following years, and the series was eventually passed to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , which currently holds the rights.
The series was kept dormant for many years [3] until former developers of the series acquired the licence to publish updated and enhanced versions of the titles under the Wanderful Interactive Storybook series in The initial motivation behind the series came from a childhood fantasy of Mark Schlichting's to enter into the picture book world of Dr.
Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! Seuss and the magic of animation through Disney. After receiving a degree in fine arts and working as a book publishing art director, he retrained in traditional animation.
The then-unknown designer [13] began pitching the CD-ROM-based Living Books around the company [8] "to anyone who would listen" [4] and presented his prototype to demonstrate the concept. You know how flowers follow the sun? That's called heliotropism. Well, kids have a 'computertropism'". After a few months of development, the first fully-featured prototype for Living Books was complete; [4] it was an adaption of Mercer Mayer's Little Monsters at School.
Mercer Meyer's popular children's book Just Grandma and Me was chosen as the premiere title of the new series, [4] as their initial attempt at "eras[ing] the line between learning and playing". Now [] a particular title currently takes 6 months to a year. Typical crew has 6 or 7 full time character animators. Initial design work on a storybook page gag planning, etc.
Two additional people "quasi-programmers" "assemble" the character animation into the proprietary format. Two more people do the sound effects and music. Though storyboards and layouts were often sketched out on paper, most of the animation was developed straight into the software instead of being scanned first. As Broderbund didn't have a recording studio, Sound designer Tom Rettig individually recorded and saved each audio file in a small office.
Schlichting campaigned for tools technologically ahead of their time to improve quality. Programmer Glenn Axworthy created the Living Books engine, which made it possible for products to be written in Macromedia Director, then to edit the files into a "cross-platform, optimized playback format" that slow speed CD-ROMs could then play into limited memory computers at the appropriate speed "regardless of the speed of the CPU of the computer running the product". Matt Siegel created an animation driver that made "animations run consistently fast regardless of their size".
There was no rush to market, because there was no market. Interactivity was vital in the design of the programs; when presenting demos to corporate executives, Schlichting would observe them fighting over the mouse and suggesting where to click.
Activities were added to help develop matching, rhyming, memory and observation skills, among others. Upon previewing a gag in Just Grandma and Me where a bird swoops across the screen with an aeroplane sound effect, developers noted this elicited laughs and chuckles in the audience.
The developers realised that with their visual awareness focused on the animation, the incongruent audio had a more subconscious cognitive impact, and the discrepancy between sound and audio created a "brain hiccup" where users would find the moment 'cute' but unsure exactly why.
Ease of use was another important design philosophy; the interface was designed such that it could be used by even the youngest of children unaccompanied. Schlichting observed that teachers wanted something to occupy children for 20 minutes at a time. When Schlichting was first designing Living Books, he visited computer stores to observe how software was displayed and marketed, and noted that they used their games' assets to show off the computer's capabilities.
To play inside the story, press this button", pointing to the appropriate button onscreen. Instead of repeating the talk loop, he opted for a dance loop with music that would encourage kids to dance in the store, bringing the products attention.
I'm alive". Living Books included the printed versions of the paperback books with the software to ensure there would be continuity where kids could play between the two and to encourage non-digital reading.
A challenge of the series was to inviting children to engage with "black-and-white abstraction" of text, when the relatable imagery proved more inviting.
Both the first two titles in the series had English and Spanish language settings while Just Grandma and Me could also be played in French, German, and Japanese, [73] [74] [75] all featured on the one disc; [6] this multilingual feature would be explored in future entries.
On the series' potential as a learning tool, Schlichting said, "software never replaces the place of a good teacher, but there are times when the teacher needs help" and that multimedia products "are great ways to do that". Originally designed for children in preschool and early elementary aged three to eight, [77] [8] the storybooks found audiences ranging as young as two and some programs reached kids nine and older, [13] [8] Schlichting noted that while younger players would click the words in sequence to "map the story", older players will click the words out-of-order to build their own silly sentences, [46] allowing for "greater language play".
Michael Krantz in Marketing Computers [93]. Broderbund released their reimagining of Just Grandma and Me in , [36] and while there was an initial concern whether there were enough customers with CD drives to run the game, in the first six months Broderbund sold over 10 times more copies than they had initially projected. By August , the title was the interactive storybook's "first big hit", and one of the few available for purchase, along with the even earlier Canadian pioneer Discis Knowledge Research 's Discis Books , whose 16 Mac titles and 11 CDTV titles had gained widespread classroom acceptance.
Due to the success of the first few titles, the Living Books division had the ability to add additional artists and musicians, and the team relocated to a new Broderbund office in Novato, California. Seuss book rights holder, saw a demo of J ust Grandma and Me and approached the team. Unique for a kid's software company, this meant Living Books was created with a "strong, in-house foundation of experience" in all stages of the business, including product development, production, marketing and publicity.
By there was a "scramble among multimedia developers to gobble up rights to intellectual property" for "translation to the new medium", and Dr. Seuss became "among the most hotly contested". Seuss rights were available they "went after them aggressively. Seuss' widow Audrey Geisel, chief executive of Dr. Seuss Enterprises and rights holder, who was known as a "fierce guardian of its artistic integrity".
Seuss as a child, leading to Geisel telling her intellectual property lawyers "I've changed my mind, I'm going to work with him". While Geisel was not impressed with this first presentation [] and felt the demo was poor, [] she chose Living Books due to her "desire to honor her husband's year association with Random House", [] giving them a second chance. Seuss books since Seuss for a deal said by a close source to be "well into the seven figures", [] and subsequently provided Living Books the "coveted" [] electronic rights to Dr.
Seuss books along with other best-selling Random House children's authors. Seuss to a digital format. Seuss Enterprises despite "competing companies offer[ing] richer financial packages". Seuss Living Books products' development. The games were highly financially successful. Seuss's ABC lists over names, including additional departments like musicians and choreographers.
At the time, there was a "trend toward familiar characters". Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham. While most titles were based on popular franchises, two were brand new. Meanwhile, the third original story Harry and the Haunted House , was written by Schlichting himself. Pindal began to work with Derek Lamb to create a prototype in the summer of , though the project would eventually be cancelled. The development team were committed to, as often as possible, working closely with each author to ensure a faithful rendering of the original story and its intent.
Schlichting said "our relationship with the authors of the original books was that we would be taking their babies, their stories, their characters, and bring them over into animated media for the first time".
Just Grandma and Me was the first digital outing for Mercer Mayer. Schlicting observed that Living Books often had a "profound effect" on their original authors; upon seeing Arthur's Teacher Trouble, Marc Brown said it "change[d] the way he thinks about books", and from then on he wrote books with animation and interaction in mind. I realize that developing children's software is very different from telling a story in a traditional book format, and I appreciate Living Books' commitment to quality and deep concern for its audience".
Seuss adaptions to be "absolutely line-proof to the books", though he relented that her husband would be "enchanted" by the "interactive personal creative possibilities" that the new form of communication offered, and was supportive of the "hidden learning process".
In response to a call by Alliance for Technology Access ATA for software companies to design products that were accessible to users with disabilities, Living Books stated their commitment to addressing accessibility issues by designing interactive, animated storybooks for all children, regardless of their ability levels [] in order to "broaden its scope of access".
Ray worked with companies that adapted the products for use on special keyboards designed for children who had problems using a standard mouse to interact with the stories cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, autism, learning delays.
Living Books began to face growing competition from Disney Interactive Disney's Animated Storybook and Microsoft in the animated storybook genre. Living Books' sales dropped while costs increased. The state of the CD-ROM industry was often put down to "inflated prices, mediocre titles, incompatibilities and bugs". The Learning Company formerly SoftKey had a significant impact on the market.
Throughout the s they had a strategy of releasing shovelware discs of freeware or shareware at very low prices, purchasing edutainment companies through hostile takeovers and reducing them to skeleton staff, while retaining only a small development team to keep cranking out new products; by Broderbund was one of the few independent companies still standing.
This had a big effect on the company's stock price. Broderbund began to have a defensive strategy of preventing the remaining edutainment companies from being acquired by The Learning Company formerly SoftKey , a factor that would lead them into re-acquiring Living Books.
This climate affected the profit projections of Living Books. In —7, Broderbund enlisted Jeff Charvat to work on the troubled series and making it work; Charvat "charg[ed] in with answers, rather than questions", a strategy Charvat later admitted "[wa]sn't the way to go". At the time, Joe Durrett, Chief Executive Officer of Broderbund noted, "although Living Books remains a small portion of Broderbund's revenue, it shares our focus on children's education and will continue to play a central role in educational software development.
This was not uncommon at the time for book publishers to revise their multimedia strategies. The Living Books excess purchase price was allocated to in-process technology and charged to Broderbund's operations account at the time of acquisition. By April , Living Books had reduced the number of titles it released per year, adopted a culture of parsimoniousness, and relied on its "high-quality back-list of classics" to "generate steady income".
August 27, saw the company release an interactive website at www. Narrative Communications, Enliven streaming technology was used to allow demos to be played over the internet. In February , Broderbund offered ICTV, provider of high-speed internet services and interactive multimedia content over cable television networks, selections from a suite of educational and entertainment interactive CD-ROM titles including Living Books.
While the Broderbund brand lived on, the company was disbanded and the talent found new opportunities. In , D. Mattel ended up selling The Learning Company formerly SoftKey to acquisition and management company The Gores Group [] for a fraction of the price they had originally paid for them. By , Mantle had accumulated a series of ex-Broderbund staff at Mantle, and upon the announcement of the iPad, he felt it was the perfect platform to bring Living Books back.
Mantle identified that there were currently no products on the market that were designed for children with autism, which had been a key demographic of Living Books. Seuss , some titles from The Berenstain Bears , and Little Critter were obtained by Oceanhouse Media , who owned all of the interactive storybook game rights and had created their own iOS titles.
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