QBooks bring kids' picture books to life on the iPad

Acting on the suggestion of the always awesome Bruce Stewart, I recently took a look at several QBooks selections from New Zealand-based developers Kiwa Media. Picture books present a real challenge for app developers. They have to balance end-user reading abilities (which are usually quite limited) with enough application richness to make younger readers want to come back, again and again, to the same story. I think that Kiwa Media has done a surprisingly good job in delivering value for the app dollar.

Kids' books, especially for younger readers, suffer from being very, very short. It's common to sit down with a stack of a dozen books and easily read through them in a single session. So, how do you add compelling content to something so minimal in duration? Kiwa Media created the idea of the "QBook."

QBooks integrate narration with touchable text, allowing children to explore words in several ways. They can simply listen and watch each word highlight as it is spoken, or they can tap words and hear how each word sounds. This allows them to associate word shapes with their pronunciations.

The narrative voices are really top notch; it's not just some guy recording in his garage. One of the sample volumes sent over to me was spoken by none other than Dr. Who's David Tennant. I could not identify the voices for the other books as easily as the good Doctor's dulcet tones, but they were all professional and clean.

Each QBook app adds many little special touches. I love the way kids can personalize their book by entering their names into the "This book belongs to" page. I was tickled by the help screen on the title page, where a full-size human hand helps explain how to interact with the book and slide from page to page.

I was also impressed by the book's ability to go from full color illustrations to black-and-white outlines, allowing kids to paint in their own colors and then substitute their version for the "real" page. And, most of all, I adored the way that kids could record their own narrations and replace the official version. Of all the features offered by the QBook software, this was the one that most engaged my littlest reader and produced the greatest degree of real reading.

The items I've mentioned are just a subset of the QBook feature set. In addition to these, there's also Touch-to-Spell, where you can hear the letters that spell each word, and a number of puzzles and games that are built around the book's words and pictures. Clearly, these books were developed with a lot of thought for pedagogy.

Kiwa Media currently has over twenty iPad picture books out on the App Store. Each title costs US$4.99 and provides a slick story-interaction experience for the 4-6 year old crowd. They should be upgraded from iPad-only to universal apps within a month or so, as Kiwa is in the final stages of getting their new iOS 4/iPhone player in shape.