Children's Books: Nurturing Early Readers Through Story Apps
Melding classical storytelling with innovative technology, Manuvo's collection of children's books features digital/interactive picture books, comics, and flipbooks for children ages 4-12 from top publishers in Latin America. Available for smartphones, tablets, and computers, these digital stories include animations, interactions, narration, music, sound effects, and many surprises that help spread the love for books.
The Challenge
Reading is a creative act: it builds bridges, mirrors, and opens doors. It develops more sensitive human beings, empathic to realities different from their own. Books take on a journey of discovery and reflection. Books educate, entertain, and hug us. In most Latin American countries, reading habits must be reinforced. In Mexico, for example, an average of 3.8 books a year are read, but only 2 out of 10 readers fully understand what they read. In contrast, in countries like India or Thailand, citizens spend over 10 hours of reading per week. This, pooled with the fact that Facebook reached 51 million registered users in Mexico, ⏤99.6% of Mexican internet users⏤, bringing books to readers in the region, had to be done through mobile technology. Technology has an amplifying power, it can bring together children and books. It can be the origin of new worlds, different perspectives, and realities, and make reading more engaging, enabling it to compete for young readers' attention. In consequence, between 2010 and 2015, Manuvo partnered with some of the top children's books publishers in Latin America, including the largest publisher in the region, Fondo de Cultura Economica, to create digital versions of appealing children's storybooks. We quickly discovered a great opportunity to develop a new way to use new technologies to tell stories, but also, to close gaps.
Introducing Manuvo’s Storybook App Collection
Manuvo's StorybookApp Collection is an award-winning set of 100+ digital/interactive picture books, comics, and flipbooks for children ages 4-12 from top publishers inLatin America. It fuses high-quality editorial design with engaging interactivity to seduce children's imagination, stimulate their senses, and appeal to their emotions.
These storybook apps propose surprising narratives, exciting aesthetics, show diversity in their characters and plots, generate curiosity, invite to learn, promote family values, raise awareness about pressing issues in Latin America, and celebrate otherness, creating a sense of mystery, humor, and adventure in children's lives.
Available for smartphones, tablets, and computers, these digital stories feature animations, interactions, music, sound effects and narrations that help foster reading habits in the region, starting with first readers, spreading the love for books. These new integrative formats develop children's imagination and unlock their creativity while also help book publishers transition and actively participate in the digital economy.
Tiny Great True Stories
A bear, penguins and Santa Claus are the main characters in this app-book that is filled with magic, tenderness and solidarity. And it is even more beautiful because it is composed of stories that really happened. This original app-book for iPad and iPhone brings you reading experiences rich with delicate animations and engrossing animations, making the stories more attractive to young readers, and encouraging their participation. Winner of 2016 Jabuti Award (Brazilian Book Chamber)
It Is So
This app, for kids aged two to five, provides users with a basic understanding of the cycles of life and loss by giving them information kids can process. While kids grasp the concept of loss until 11, this first approach can be used as a support to the development of this subject while keeping the attention with its interactive and dynamic format.
The Building
In the '30s, watchmaker Levin moves his workshop to the first floor in the center of the city of Bogotá. There he meets Mrs. Blanca, who lives very quietly on the third floor, and together they attend the continuous change of the neighborhood and the neighbors. In the eighties, a new tenant arrives, a small child who will alter life in the building. This graphic novel narrates the life of architecture and its inhabitants in the city of Bogotá. Winner of 2014 Digital Creation Award (Ministry of Culture of Colombia).
Reading fosters children's imagination and creativity. Which manifests in the types of drawings children make, the types of games they play, the stories they tell, and even in the dreams they have. Providing young girls and boys with the tools they need to develop these skills is at the core of these projects at Manuvo.