Calvin Wang was watching his four-year-old daughter reading a children's pop-up book when he glimpsed the future of books in the tablet era.
A former development director for Electronic Arts' Need for Speed franchise, Wang realized in 2010 that touch-screen tablets would allow books and comic books to come alive in a whole new way with the addition of multi-touch interactivity over rich media.
"At the time, the Apple iPad was just being launched," said Wang, founder and CEO of Loud Crow Interactive, one of a handful of local interactive book developers spawned by the touch tablet.
"A light bulb went on in my head that said, 'If we could take that kind of experience and recreate it in a digital medium, we could create a very compelling experience.'"
Wang and four partners – all former EA developers – created their first interactive digital book based on Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The paid app was followed by The Night Before Christmas. Both were selected as Apple's app of the week.
"We had back-to-back hits, so we started getting some validation in what we were doing," said Wang, who will be a panellist at the October 24 to 26 Merging Media Conference in Vancouver.
Loud Crow produced four interactive books based on the stories of children's writer Sandra Boynton. It then struck a partnership with Peanuts Worldwide LLC to recreate A Charlie Brown Christmas as an interactive comic book.
The company even managed to get Peter Robbins – the child actor voice of Charlie Brown – to narrate the story, which recreates scenes of the original cartoon, with added layers of interactivity.
"You hear his voice twice in the book – once when he was eight or nine doing the Charlie Brown voice – and now as an adult narrating the book," Wang said.
Whereas digital comics are simply a digital version of a comic book, interactive books and comic books have layers of rich media that include sound effects, narration, music and games.
Loud Crow also recently worked with Marvel Comics to create The Avengers: Iron Man Mark VII edition – an interactive comic book.
Two other local developers in the interactive book space are Moving Tales (see sidebar) and Switch United, which has developed interactive graphic novel and games for the TV series Arctic Air and Ice Pilots. •
Publishing, animation or drama? Keeping up with changing landscapes
Matthew Talbot-Kelly, founder of Moving Tales, has a background in film and characterizes Moving Tales stories as audiobooks that are fully animated.
He describes the emerging interactive book sector as a kind of "Wild West" frontier, where publishers are finding it tough to keep pace with a changing media landscape.
Because animation is considered drama, many book publishers don't have the drama rights to written works.
"The publishers are panicking," Talbot-Kelly said. "Publishing contracts – up until the last year and a half – didn't include animation rights, and animation is considered drama. Penguin will have these contracts with all these writers and illustrators, but they couldn't implement some of the more adventurous possibilities, because they don't have the rights for them."
Developers are also struggling with how to market their creations. Outside of the Apple and Android app stores, there is no real marketplace for interactive books yet.
"There are very few people who are making money," Talbot-Kelly said.
