Mobile phones now put children's books in your pocket

Curious George has a new place to get into trouble, your cell phone.

Children's book authors and publishers are rushing to transform their paper book stories into digital versions on smart phones, blending their once-upon-a-time plots with elaborate sound effects, animation and 3D effects.

Some of the newest versions of these books even allow parents and children to record their own page-by-page narration, making them a personal literacy tool.

In just the last few months, Dr. Seuss, Curious George, Mr. Bump, Alice in Wonderland and a slew of other major kids book icons have burst onto the mobile phone scene, often with a digital sticker price a fraction what the paper book version costs.

"The sky is open to anything we want to do with digital," said Michael Kripalani, a former video game publisher in San Diego whose company, Oceanhouse Media Inc., won the rights to publish Dr. Seuss stories on cell phones. "We're working as fast as we can and shipping two to three new titles a week."

Such books open a range of issues in the kid's book genre. For authors, a digital platform opens up vast options for interacting with readers in more creative ways. For book publishers, there's potential new revenue, especially from selling games linked to stories. For parents, this means yet another reason kids will want to borrow Mom or Dad's cell phone, or demand one of their own.

In the nascent and anything goes market of cell phone apps, publishers count as veterans if they've been selling kids titles for more than a year.

Over the last year, Oceanhouse won the rights to publish 44 Dr. Seuss titles, partly because Kripalani had a personal connection to Audrey Geisel, the widow of Dr. Seuss creator Theodor Seuss Geisel.

Sales figures are still closely held, but Kripalani said they're selling tens of thousands of copies a month, and expect that figure to reach several hundred thousand a year soon.

While a hardback version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas may cost $15, the iPhone version costs $2.99. And with no need for printing, storage or shipping, a digital publisher incurs no more cost to produce 1,000 copies than just one. Still, there are hurdles.

"It may be something that sounds easy, just putting an illustrated book on a cell phone screen," Kripalani said. But there are lots of challenges, like how to shrink a two-page illustration to a 2-inch screen. For now, zooming in and panning the image seems the best solution.

To help kids read and follow the text, Kripalani's version highlights each word as a narrator reads along, and kids can touch an object on the screen - like a chair, a fish or a toy - and the system reads that word aloud.

To generate extra revenue, Oceanhouse built a separate Cat In The Hat game for another $1.99 that lets users take pictures and put people's faces into a Grinch character image to e-mail to a friend. In the $1.99 Lorax game, players cultivate virtual Trufulla trees.

If kids don't like the professional narration, the ScrollMotion company of New York City lets parents and kids record their own page-by-page narration to make the story personal.

ScrollMotion has secured rights to stories from Sesame Street (a.k.a. the Elmo franchise) Veggie Tales, the Candlewick series of "Maisy" books, and books by author Todd Parr among others.

For now, Apple seems to be in the lead with mobile phone kids books, with dozens of titles for sale in its iTunes catalog. But other formats are getting involved as well. Publishers are experimenting with versions that run on Google's Android platform. And BlackBerry has a few titles in its app store as well.

All this presents something of a dilemma for the centuries-old industry of children's literature.

To be sure, the stories themselves can count as literature. But they're not exactly "books" anymore if they exist on cell phones.

Children's literature authors may still covet the honored Newbery Medal for their stories, and illustrators may still hope for a Caldecott Medal. But it's undefined how library groups that give out some of the most prestigious awards would approach a digital book that doesn't exactly exist in a physical library.

"The award category just does not exist yet," for books on phones, said Macey Morales, a spokeswoman for the American Library Association.

Meanwhile, authors are fast leaving traditional publishers behind.

Wallace Keller, for instance, saw his kids book "Wrong Side of the Bed," go out of print more than five years ago, but he retained the copyright.

When he saw potential on cell phones, he thought "why not just do it ourselves," he said. Keller and a few colleagues basically created See Here Studios in San Francisco, and started working around the clock to make his story ready for the April launch of the iPad, with him as the narrator.

Their hook - images in 3D that bring a new dimension to the story of a boy who wakes up in a world that's upside down. Now the title is in the top 10 best seller list on Apple iTunes for books.

"I have friends still in publishing in New York, and we get into lengthy debates about where this is all going," Keller said. "It seems like there's now a mild civil war between new and old publishers."

Newer versions take stories a step further. One of the several Alice in Wonderland versions for the iPad incorporates animation. And in the spirit of the jabberwocky drama, as readers turn the pad, objects on the screen "fall" down to the bottom.

Part-time author Hayes Roberts saw what he considers huge success by shifting from the book world to cell phone literature.

In 2006, he self-published a couple kids books, but only sold two hundred copies. Then, the company iStoryTime asked to publish his titles on phones. One of the first was "The Wiener Dog Magnet," about a young monkey who earns enough allowance from cleaning her room to buy what turns out to be a magical magnet that attracts wiener dogs.

The story has been downloaded more than 5,000 times, Roberts said, and he's seen other titles translated into 10 languages, "which is phenomenally better than paper books for me. And it's simpler, cheaper and more fantastic."

His story "Brave Monkey Pirate" about a monkey who needs to get a shot at the doctor, may have sold just 100 copies in print, but in more than 2,500 copies for cell phones in the last few months.

If kids spending all this time with cell phones seems a bit strange, Roberts has a bit of irony to offer.

His next story will be on a cell phone, but it will feature a young monkey who "lives in a world where everyone is always looking at little computer screens all the time, and he just wants to play outside instead."