Elmo and his Sesame Street friends have already set up shop in Apple’s App Store, but today Bert, Ernie, Big Bird and the rest of the crew now have their own e-bookstore to call home.
The Sesame Street e-bookstore is an online collection of 121 character-driven e-books — covering learning subject areas like letters, numbers, counting and colors — offered in standard, audio, interactive and animated formats. Users pay an annual $39.99 subscription fee for unlimited access to all titles.
The e-books available include many of the same titles that Sesame Street has published over the past 40 years, but with digital additives. Audio e-books include narration, sound effects and music; interactive titles invite children to participate in the storytelling process; and animated e-books read like movies with full-color animation.
The site gives users their own bookshelf, includes tips for parents and boasts simplified navigation for children in Kids Mode.
Sesame Street’s digital publishing initiative is an aggressive move that makes its popular titles relevant to today’s web-centric world. Sesame Street has, however made a few puzzling choices; for instance, books are only accessible through the Sesame Street e-book reader, a browser-based application that requires Flash and is thus neither platform-independent nor mobile-friendly. Also, the annual subscription fee model implies that users won’t actually own any of the titles.
Still, if parents respond to the e-bookstore the same way they’ve responded to iPhone and iPad versions of Sesame Street content, then this endeavor could prove to be a big success for the educational non-profit.
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Tags: ebooks, sesame street
