Kindle Kids by Susan Price
In between bouts of editing the Sterkarms, I've been having a look at Kindle Kids' Book Creator.
I'm interested because I'm hoping to publish some picture books,
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| Brother Adam's chapati chasing tiger |
It allows you to import art work in jpeg, tif or png format (it says here. The only one of them I know anything about is jpeg.)
It recommends, however, that you save your book as 'a multi-paged PDF file,' with the cover included as the first page, and upload it like that - which is what my brothers and I will be doing.
The part that really interests me, though, is the 'text pop-ups.'
Since the text will probably be embedded in the art-work, and might be viewed on the small screen of a mobile phone, it will be quite hard to read. Kindle Kids allows you to programme in a 'text
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| Brother Andrew's goat-bothering troll |
When you download Kindle Kids, a detailed book of instructions is included, as a PDF.
There's also a Previewer, which allows you to see what your picture book will look like on several different devices.
I wonder if Amazon has plans to extend the possibilities of Kindle Kids? I've been looking at picture book apps which allow you, for instance, to tap on a word and hear that word spoken aloud - so helping children to link the spoken word, which they probably already recognise, with the written word.
The apps allow you to highlight one word - so books that emphasis a particular sound might highlight the letters that produce that sound.
These apps also make it possible to touch a picture of a dog, and hear it bark - or the picture of a ship and see it sail away, off the page. I would love to do something like this, but could not possibly afford to pay a programmer a fair price to do all that pernickety, brain-breaking work.
If anyone knows more about these apps, I'd be very interested to learn.
The work that goes into a picture-book, by the way - I'll say it again - is enormous. And usually under-rated. The composition of the pictures, the balance of colours and shapes - the revision to allow for text - the revision of the text to fit with the pictures - the effort needed to make the few limited words bounce and spark... It annoys me to see these books so often dismissed as 'stuff for kids' when they are works of art and love.
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Susan Price is an award winning writer, with work translated and published in many countries world-wide.
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