New APP from TOON BOOKS

Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons joins the ever-growing list of books online for your and your children's reading enjoyment. As always, multiple languages are available to make the experience even more educational! Compare and contrast words in French and English, or even Mandarin!

TOON Books Launches Revolutionary iPhone Application!

Press Release:

NEW YORK, March 29, 2010 – TOON Books is pleased to announce the release of the second of its comics for beginning readers iPhone application. Parents and children can enjoy award-winning books anywhere with the convenience of an iPhone or iPod touch.

Available for $2.99 at the iPhone App Store, the first iphone TOON Book immediately broke into the top 100. Parents can entertain and educate children with easy-to-read comics. Kids can immerse themselves with words and images while waiting at the grocery store, restaurant or airport.

(image created using Photoshop)

Titles currently available are Jack and the Box by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman and Little Mouse Gets Ready, a Theodor Seuss Geisel Award Honor book, by Jeff Smith, author of Bone. “Comics for the Jet Age! It’s exciting to see little mouse available on a new digital platform,” said Smith. Other TOON books will be offered soon.

Unique features of the TOON Books iPhone app include:
• Authors read their work. Children can hear the authors’ voices and see their drawings.
• Designed specifically for young readers to easily use, the pages can be turned automatically or manually.
• Onscreen text and highlighted speech balloons help readers make associations between the words they hear and see. It is the closest experience to being read a book that any app can deliver. As with all TOON Books, repeated use builds reading fluency.
• Narration is available in five languages - English, Spanish, French, Russian and Mandarin Chinese.

“The app takes full advantage of its electronic medium by introducing young readers to other languages,” says Art Spiegelman.

www.toon-books.com/special.php

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jack-and-the-box-kids-book/id361738578?

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/little-mouse-gets-ready-kids/id364080905?mt=8

This is a collaboration between TOON Books and iStoryTime, a publisher of children’s storybooks for the iPhone. iStoryTime has the largest library of illustrated and narrated children’s books for the phone. iStoryTime books are available in the iPhone App Store in 80 countries.

Editorial Director Francoise Mouly (also Art Editor of The New Yorker) received overwhelming praise for the TOON Books collection, launched in Spring 2008. Vetted by educators and librarians, the books are now used in many K-4 classrooms and are the cornerstone of TOON in… A Comics in the Schools Initiative presented in partnership with the NYC School Library System.

For more information and to see our FREE, LITERARY, ONLINE TOOLS FOR KIDS, please visit: http://www.toon-books.com

Tons of Iphone Comics News This Week

As if Marvel's Spider-Woman web comic being the #1 app download in iTunes this week wasn't impressive enough news, more stories keep coming about companies trying to get a piece of this pie. OK, perhaps that's bad phrasing considering the "lets see how boobs look when a woman in a skin-tight costume who can fly is upside down, sideways, etc." inspired thinking behind the Spider-Woman story (a critique, but not exactly a complaint). But, you get the picture.....

A story from Te Beat is embedded in this post's title. Here's a link to ICV2's coverage of the fast-spreading phenomenon.

Ipod Comics and Cell Comics News

ICV2 reports that the new comics browser from Comixology is the #1 app at the iTunes store. ICV2 also reports that Manga delivered to cell phones accounts for almost $350 million dollars in sales in Japan.