Not a monster but a giant in the book world

There is little left to say about Maurice Sendak now because almost everyone in the library world and the children's book world have been talking about him since his recent death. The news shocked readers who had grown up with Where the Wild Things Are and Sendak's other books. The tweets started pouring out about childhood memories of those remarkable monsters which were scary but somehow not threatening. Now the NY Times has published a particularly charming tribute from many of the illustrators and writers of children's books who have been influenced by Maurice Sendak's work. If you haven't read it yet, be sure not to miss it--and don't miss the slideshow. Sendak has influenced generations of writings, publishers and librarians who have come to expect some of his honesty and quirky vision in children's books. He can truly be called a revolutionary figure.

Would Maurice Sendak be part of the current revolution in children's books? It's hard to say. He expressed his opinion of ebooks very tartly on the Stephen Colbert show not long ago. He dismissed them out of hand as not being real books at all and his scornful words have been flashed around the Internet on YouTube. Is he right? Does his status as a pioneer make his opinion of the future, or the present, believable? In the long run it will be the children who decide. Change is inevitable and perhaps future generations will feel just as nostalgic and sentimental about their apps as today's adults are about the picture books they grew up with.

The value of librarians is that we welcome all sorts of innovations and accept the best of the new while preserving the treasures of the past. We certainly have a responsibility to keep alive the seminal works of Maurice Sendak, but we don't have to accept his opinions as gospel. There will undoubtedly be great ebooks coming along and the future belongs to the children growing up in it, not to those of us who grew up in the past.

What do we do about apps?

Children's librarians are experts on picture books--we take this for granted. We know how to evaluate them, share them with children, choose the appropriate book for an individual child and even, in our professional groups, choose the best books of the year. We award the most prestigious prizes for children's books. But now we are coping with a new technology tht may be confusing and even make us feel hostile. Children and parents are choosing to buy their picture books in the form of apps that they look at on the screen of an i-pad, i-phone or a Kindle fire. A few pioneering public libraries loan i-Pads and quite a few schools offer them routinely to children, but for many librarians this whole area is a mystery. What's the future of apps in libraries? Here are some of the questions:
--Will we ever be able to loan apps separately from the equipment for viewing them?
--Most apps are very cheap, but they are not high quality. How can we encourage better apps?
--How are we going to catalog and keep track of apps if we circulate them?

These questions deserve a lot of thought, although it's not clear that the library profession is spending their time that way. For a start, you might read the Children's Apps Manifesto
put together by two savvy tech people who have thought about the pricing structure of apps and what business models best serve the needs of parents and children. The manifesto doesn't address the needs or interests of libraries, but that will come if librarians make their voices heard. While the purchase of apps is a growing trend for middle-and-upper-class families, they still haven't saturated society. If you traveled by air on Thanksgiving Weekend, you probably saw lots of kids in airports clutching little electronic screens enjoying picture book apps. If you traveled by Greyhound bus, as I did, you more likely saw a kid with a plastic bag holding a battered book from Walmart. Libraries are the great equalizers. We should be sure to make our voices heard in the discussions about the future of children's apps. Our patrons will want them and while we don't ever want to give up books, we should add the excitement and possibilities of apps to the mix. Let's pay attention and make sure the children in our libraries get their share.

The apps they are a'coming

By this time almost every librarian and teacher has seen children's apps on i-Pads, i-phones, and other mobile devices. Will we have them in our libraries soon? Children clamor for them and parents approve, so it looks as though we will. We might as well get ready to examine them and think about standards that will help us to judge them. To work toward that end, School Library Journal sponsored a panel discussion last week, "The Children's App Landscape" during which editors, app producers, and librarians discussed what made a good app.Lisa Von Drasek, a children's librarian at the Bank Street College of Education, defined what librarians want from apps: "We want story. We want art. We want developmental appropriateness." Sounds pretty much the same as what we want from books, doesn't it? Can apps meet the test? Well, some of the best apps are certainly passing with flying colors. Virginia Duncan, an editor at Greenwillow, pointed out reasons for the success of the app made from Freight Train by Donald Crews, noting that the art is clean, the type fits the image, the font is legible even on a small screen, and the story is linear. Probably everyone who is familiar with the book Freight Train (and what librarian isn't?) can visualize how well it would adapt to the digital format. Not all children's picture books appear to be such a good match for a different format, but with the help of committed artists, producers, and editors, many of them will undoubtedly be successfully transformed. It's up to librarians and teachers to figure out how best to integrate these apps into our collections and make them available to children. Probably ALSC will soon come up with a new committee to award a medal for the best app of the year. It is an exciting prospect. Don't miss the fun!

Miss Spider at the Grocery Store

The latest PW article about Digital Publishing for Children makes a good point and one that librarians should note. Buying a book as an iPad or iPhone app does not necessarily mean a family won't buy the same book in print or borrow it from the library. A popular story like "Miss Spider's Tea Party" makes a perfect bedtime read at home when sitting in Mom or Dad's lap is part of the enjoyment, but as an app it can also be enjoyed over and over again sitting in a grocery cart or in a subway car. All librarians and parents know that children love to return again and again to the same story, so why not have it available in convenient format for many occasions? Several publishers believe that owning multiple copies of books in different formats will become an important factor sales. For less affluent families for whom a hardcover children's book is too expensive, a library copy to supplement the inexpensive phone app will be a likely solution. Everyone connected with publishing these days is making predictions about what the future will hold, some will be right, but not all. To catch up on what the industry is thinking, librarians will want to check out the new issue of PW, which also lists the forthcoming books for the fall.

Curiouser and curiouser

The classic picture books about Curious George and the man with the yellow hat continue to fly off the shelves in libraries and bookstores. Now the Library of Congress has decided to feature these characters in their ads to promote reading. According to a story in the N.Y. Times today, ads designed to encourage parents to read to their young children will be shown on TV and published in magazines. Many researchers have demonstrated that children whose parents read to them during their preschool years generally develop a love of reading and learn to read on their own more quickly than children whose parents do not read to them. Anyone who has worked in a children's library or school knows that Curious George will fascinate any child so the campaign is likely to succeed. We owe a debt of gratitude to the Reys for producing the books and to Random House and the Ad Council for making the campaign happen as well as to the Library of Congress for sponsoring it.

China leads the way

Not very many American librarians go to the Hong Kong book fair, but it sounds as though those who did got a glimpse of the future. For the first time, according to the NY Times, the e-book made a splash at the fair and children's books were front and center. Kiwa, the New Zealand software company, showed off its i-Pad app for children's picture books. Not only do the pictures and text appear, but they can be translated into half a dozen different languages. Chinese children and American children can watch the action and laugh at the jokes while their parents read them the story in whatever language they choose. What an asset this would be for libraries in multi-lingual schools or neighborhoods in the U.S.! It may take a while, but almost inevitably these will be added to the collections at many libraries.

Something completely different

Sometimes even librarians get tired of worrying about the state of publishing or the future of books. When you want to hear a cheerful story about how kids can interact with books, click on this one from Publishers Weekly blog and see how children can react to an imaginative project suggested by a creative school librarian. Building birdhouses out of old picture books may not strike you as something you'd ever want to do, but it is refreshing to see how cheerful and inspiring an unusual work of art can be. It may even inspire you to create other inspiring projects for the children in your library.

Are picture books migrating?

The release of the i-pad has unleashed a lot of excitement in the children's publishing world. At last it seems possible that children's picture books could go online without losing the illustrations and idiosyncratic fonts that make many of them so appealing. Publisher's Weekly outlined the plans of some of the largest publishers. There is no doubt that authors and illustrators will be watching to see whether these first ventures are accepted by parents and children. Anyone who has watched young children in cars or airplanes busily watching DVDs of children's books knows that young children are not opposed to seeing books on a screen rather than in print. And think of the convenience of a long road trip or family vacation on which parents could take dozens of picture books and alternate reading them instead of going over one dog-eared copy of Curious George fifty or sixty times. The i-pad may be a boon to several generations.

Little Critters calling

News about children's books being offered in varied formats appears almost every day. Publisher's Weekly has just announced that Mercer Mayer's Little Critters books are now appearing as i-phone aps. The touch screen allows children to touch various hot spots on the screen and to listen to the story or to see animations. The book Just Me and My Dad allows plenty of scope for action and sound and Mayer is planning on bringing many of his books to the small screen. Some of them have already been available for PCs, but the touch screen of the i-pod makes it easier for children to handle. Mobile phones are also, of course, much more portable than PCs, so parents can look forward to hours of driving pleasure while the kids in the back seat huddle over their i-phones absorbing literature.

Judging the covers

People who love picture books--both children and adults--almost always judge a book by its cover. But who judges the covers? Well, read this blog "Jacket Knack" to find out about some of the best covers now appearing. Once you get starting looking at them it's hard to break away. How many children's picture books have no words at all on the cover? That's not a question I've ever thought about but it's fascinating to see the examples given in this blog. Anyone who cares about children's picture books will enjoy reading the posts about their covers.

Season of Awards is starting

As winter comes, librarians scan the journals, newspapers, and websites for lists of Best Books of the Year. One of the first contenders in this contest of lists is the N.Y. Times list of the Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2009.
No one interested in picture books should miss the thumbnail pictures of the book covers, each linked to its review in the paper. Most of the styles of illustration now popular for children are represented--except for the growing group of graphic novel formats. One of the chosen books is an unconventional retelling of familiar folktales with stark, bold illustrations, another is an elaborate pop-up book that would never survive a child's handling. Some of these books will be more popular with adults than with children, but each of them represents an aspect of children's book culture today. Komako Sakai's The Snow Day brings memories of Ezra Jack Keat's classic Snowy Day, but this time instead of a recognizable child, the leading character is a bunny who lives like a human. Is this perhaps a move into abstraction so critics cannot raise issues of race or stereotyping? All of these books, although beautiful and worthy of a child's attention, seem curiously remote from the world our children live in. They exist perhaps to serve the needs of artists and other adults more than the needs of children. This is a trend worth thinking about.

Talking about picture books

Children's books are being discussed in the general media more than ever. The New Yorker has an article on the behavior of children in picture books that every librarian ought to read. The author, Daniel Zalewski, compares the behavior of recent protagonists like Olivia the cheerful little pig to earlier ones like Frances the Badger in Russel Hoban's classic picture books. The more recent heroes and heroines triumph over their parents, misbehaving in wildly inappropriate ways without experiences any downside. Unlike the parents in the Frances books or the even earlier Robert McCloskey books, today's parents are unable to restrain their children's tantrums. In the new Constance series by Pierre LeGall, the young heroine is able to fool all the adults around her by acting virtuous in boarding school without really changing her outrageous behavior while at home. Do these new books reflect a change in parental behavior or simply a new freedom for editors, authors and illustrators to portray naughtiness that would ge many children into trouble? Fantasy is fine for young children, but librarians might do well to talk to kids at storyhour about whether these stories reflect something that might happen or whether they are pure imagination. Let's hear some feedback from the target audience!

Books without paper

Drawing on the vast popularity of its stories and films, the Disney Corporation has decided to offer its storybooks in a new format. The company is setting up a website which will make Disney books available for children to read or for parents to read to their child. Each book is reproduced on the screen and children can move through it page by page with the click of a mouse. If they encounter an unfamiliar word, a click of the mouse brings an audio definition. Books are listed in age categories so both parents and children can choose age appropriate titles. A subscription to the site will cost each family $79.95 a year. Although the company insists their website will not supplant the experience of having a parent read while the child snuggles on her lap, it is easy to guess that some busy parents will encourage their children to switch on the computer instead of asking for an individual session. Will other publishers follow this lead? None has shown interest so far, but then no other publisher has such deep pockets and such a large collection of content. It's too bad the Disney illustrations are so similar to one another. A child would benefit from a wider variety of styles. Nonetheless it seems likely this project will catch on and librarians may soon be asking for institutional subscriptions to the website.