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Digitized, illustrated stories with sound effects entertain, educate: Memphis family turning a new page: [The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn.]
(Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Feb. 7--Family reading time at the home of Brad and Dina Martin looks a little different than one might expect. While Brad Martin may read a book aloud to two of his young boys, the other boy may choose to hear a video book read to him from his palm-size, digital library.
Recently all three boys were hearing such stories and watching animated characters on their iPods. Myles, 5, flipped icons with the balletic fingers of a pro, while Jack, 3, sang the "On Top of Spaghetti" story song, and Wesley, his twin brother, hunched over a tale of misbehaving monkeys as if he were taking notes.
The boys were experiencing something new in children's literature: Moving Picture Books. Created by a Knoxville company, they are not cartoons or text-only "ebooks," but stories, classic and new, read to children in the author's words and illustrated with imaginatively drawn moving figures, music and sound effects.
For the Martin family of East Memphis, the new genre will soon become more novel still, since they will watch themselves in a Moving Picture Book written about them by Brad Martin, who is the former chairman and CEO of Saks Inc. Martin's book, "Myles' Pesky Friends," due out in April as both a digital book and a print book, is set at his family's summer home on the Caribbean island of Grenada, where Martin, 58, wrote the story last year.
Martin retired as chairman at Saks in 2007 and
now serves on the board of First Horizon National Corp, and Dillard's Inc., as well as being involved in several civic and charitable organizations.
"We don't view (the digital books) as a substitute for reading," said Meg Lonon, the Knoxville mother of children ages 9 and 4 who came up with the idea. "What's different about this and SpongeBob is that the character doesn't come to life; the book comes to life."
Lonon is senior vice president and general manager with RIVR Media Interactive and Moving Picture Books, the company that officially launched the books in July. The stories may be downloaded to computers, iPhones, iPods, and iPod Touch devices, like the Martin children have, that play music, movies and games. Or they may be bought as DVDs or as micro SD memory cards for SmartPhones and other devices.
Lonon thinks the books may engage children's attention sooner than paper books and create a love for reading.
The concept has intrigued faculty at the University of Tennessee enough to prompt a planned study of their usefulness in classrooms as a tool for teaching language skills to preschool children.
Martin said he wrote "Myles' Pesky Friends," originally "for fun and to read to my children but I kept rewriting it ... and it became something I was more interested in." In the story, Myles befriends the exotic iguanas, monkeys and owls and other creatures the family encounters in Grenada, but his father thinks of them as pests and objects to their squawking and eating his fruit and to the crabs that try to get into the house. Then one day when a storm brews the animals turn out to be invaluable friends.
Martin was a friend of Lonon in Knoxville and familiar with the digital book concept.
He showed the book to RIVR Media, which proposed publishing it in the two forms.
The book was illustrated by Micki Martin of Memphis and Andrea Truan of Knoxville, and the characters look like the family.
The Martin family has about 30 downloaded stories, which Brad Martin called "a fantastic tool. We absolutely still read aloud, but we see this as a supplement." Recently, in the waiting room of a pediatrician's office, he kept not only Wesley entertained with a book on his iPhone, but other kids there, too. The family has used them on car and plane trips and especially to keep their children of different ages all engaged.
Moving Picture Books is owned by RIVR Media Interactive and Dalmatian Press and has 44 stories available now. You can download 3- to 5-minute stories for 99 cents each as an iPhone app or buy six-story DVDs at 200 select Walmarts (none in Memphis) for $9.96. You can also buy DVDs and digital downloads at movingpicturebooks.com. Longer 8- to 10-minute stories licensed from Sesame Street are scheduled to be available on the Web site this month and from iTunes in the near future.
Titles include favorites from Dalmatian press including "Eency Weency Spider," "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly," and "Eight Silly Monkeys" and stories from first-time authors including Martin.
You can elect to display text or not. And for all the stories except those from Sesame Street, you may elect to hear them read in English or Spanish. There are plans to have them in other languages as well.
You can preview books on the Web site and read reviews posted there. Most are enthusiastic, though some complain about stories being slow to download or to sync to an iPhone.
"We have every reason to be hopeful this will be good to help kids acquire reading skills earlier, and reading is the key to all learning," said Dr. Bob Rider, dean of UT's College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences. For the classroom, such books can be displayed on a large, digital smartboard, he said. Rider presented a moving picture book to a class of first-graders in Knoxville, "and they absolutely loved it," he said.
Dr. Amy Broemmel, UT associate professor of education, is one of four UT faculty members preparing a research project that would study the effects exposure to Moving Picture Books would have on language and comprehension skills for kids in pre-school and kindergarten classes in Knoxville. They hope to begin an eight-week study this month.
"We know reading aloud from books affects their language (skills), but that takes one-on-one time, so we suspect having a book read aloud by computer would have similar implications," she said. The books could be especially helpful for disadvantaged kids, who enter school without strong language background experience, she said.
Certainly the magnetic attraction between kids and the digital world seems endless. The Martin kids never put their digital books down the whole reading period, not even when their dad suggested they all view a story together. "No," said Jack, darting away with a kid's familiar objection. "I want to do it myself."
-- Barbara Bradley, 529-2370.
Read on
To find out more go to movingpicturebooks.com.
To see more of The Commercial Appeal or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.commercialappeal.com.
Copyright (c) 2010, The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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