My wife and I are both very keen to help our daughter embrace and enjoy reading, and luckily for us she has done since a very early age “ and now at the age of 6 she ‘s an avid reader and a real lover of books.
In the last several months she ‘s also become a big fan of books on the iPhone, and we ‘re constantly adding to our collection of stories, books, and particularly audio books, on the iPhone. The Three Little Pigs is a fun and classic story, so we ‘ve recently given The Story of the Three Little Pigs By L. Leslie Brooke (Text Synchronized Audio Book) a try.
This is going to be quite a short review, because this app is hugely disappointing “ to put it in a Three Little Pigs sort of context, it is a straw house for sure, no bricks at all
One thing that I think is a hugely obvious part of the fun in reading with young kids is that lively illustrations add a lot to the enjoyment level. This has always held true for our daughter anyway, across printed books and stories as well as iPhone apps. With popup books you can never turn the page before all the popups and pull-outs etc. have been checked out. With illustrated books, she ‘ll often have a comment on nearly every picture throughout a story book.
With well produced iPhone books, she will always linger on a page and look at the pictures, comment on them, tap to hear any funny little additional sounds, and so on. If there ‘s some animation and movement, then so much the better. This is a big, big part of the experience for her, and for all of us while we ‘re reading on the iPhone.
Hell, this is one of the key selling points for many iPhone books “ they ‘re embracing the power of the device and offering a multimedia experience.
Having said all this, I ‘d ask you to take a quick glance back at the screencap at the top of this post. That is pretty much the height of the visual experience in this app. Black text, grey background, no pictures, no animation.
No fun, no magic, nothing to help pull you into the story.
To say that the app takes a charming old story and makes it a thoroughly boring experience on the iPhone is an understatement. My daughter did not come close to listening to this one all the way through. She knows what other story and book apps offer, and she was demanding to switch to one of those within very few minutes. In fact, she seemed convinced that I was just playing some kind of bad joke on her by even suggesting we listen to this story while staring at drab pages set to auto-scroll at a snail ‘s pace.
I cannot think of another app that ‘s been more disappointing to us on the iPhone.
If there is a big market of grown-ups who want to listen to stories like The Three Little Pigs in a no-frills, no thrills style, then perhaps this app will find an audience.
If it ‘s aimed at kids though “ which I ‘m going to go way out on a limb and say should be the case for this sort of story “ it ‘s a total fail in my book. I rarely find an app with no saving graces, but I just can ‘t think of any for this one.
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TAGS: iPhone books apps
