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The Real Future of Publishing

By on April 14, 2010

There’s been a lot of talk about how the iPad is the future of publishing and that’s probably true.  People point to the various newspaper and magazine apps for the iPad as examples of where the industry is heading.  To be sure, a lot of those apps are very strong and I’ll be reviewing them here in coming days but to see what publishing is really going to looking like in two years you’re going to need some help from Woody and Buzz.

Yesterday, on a lark, I downloaded a free Toy Story Read-A-Long book for my iPad.  I wanted to have something fun to do with my daughter and the price was right.  Well, I was totally unprepared for the awesomeness of this app.  It’s obviously geared towards kids but Disney has taken book publishing to the next level with this little app.

What’s so cool about it?  Well, while it certainly feels like a book with page turning and the like, it also adds music and video.  There are small games and the ability to color certain pages with your figure.  The text of the book is there and you can choose to read it yourself or have the pre-recorded narration play on each page.  You can also — get this — record your own narration and save it with the book so your child can listen to YOU reading the book to them even when you’re not there.  (I don’t know how necessary that is because there aren’t that many kids with their own iPads these days and I can’t imagine a parent just handing an iPad to a kid to play with unattended but you get the idea.)

I couldn’t stop thinking about what kids are going consider “normal” in a few years when it comes to books.

If you have an iPad and some young kids, download this free app immediately and go play.  Even if you don’t have any kids, download this thing and think about the future of children’s ministry as capabilities like this become more common place.

You can get the app via iTunes.

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