Head on over to the PaperTigers website to find out more about talented artist Shirin Adl and to see a selection of her work, including illustrations from our current Book of the Month, Let’s Celebrate! Festival Poems from Around the World.  Shirin grew up in Iran, and now lives in Oxford, UK.  Her work combines exuberance of color and media (find out in our Q&A, for example, how she used cling film to good effect in Let’s Celebrate!), and we will soon be able to enjoy her writing in print also – in the meantime, visit Shirin’s website for a taste of her unique story-telling voice.

Continuing our exploration of the world of e-books for children, we’re asking practitioners and people on the ground about some of the challenges and triumphs for them personally, as well as for the children’s publishing industry as a whole.

Today we have with us Janet Wong, former lawyer turned children’s book author of numerous books, including A Suitcase of Seaweed, Me and Rolly Maloo, Twist: Yoga Poems, and Once Upon a Tiger, an illustrated e-book poetry collection about endangered animals, as well as three e-poetry collections, co-designed and edited with Sylvia Vardell: Poetry Tag Time, p*tag and the recently released Gift Tag. Janet’s many awards include the International Reading Association’s “Celebrate Literacy Award”.

We first interviewed Janet in 2008 and it’s great to welcome her back to PaperTigers to talk here about her experiences with e-books.

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What was your inspiration for writing e-books? Was that your intention from the get-go, or was there an evolution in your creative process?

Sylvia Vardell and I hatched our PoetryTagTime project one year ago at the NCTE convention with one simple goal: to make poetry an impulse buy. Poetry books are too often neglected, left to collect dust on bookshelves. We wanted people to hear about our books, read a sample poem, click “buy” (for no more than the cost of a cup of coffee)–and fall in love with poetry!

Children’s books, particularly picture books, present specific challenges to the e-book industry in terms of faithful reproduction of art and story. They also present exciting opportunities for new forms of interaction. What limitations or challenges, expected or unexpected, have you personally experienced creating e-books for children, and in turn, what benefits have you discovered as compared to printed books?

Designing for the small black-and-white screen of the Kindle isn’t easy, especially since you can’t know what size font a reader will choose. A child who chooses a large font might end up breaking a poem’s lines in places where a line break might be, well, ugly. For our third PoetryTagTime venture, GIFT TAG, Sylvia came up with the name “Kindleku” to describe the form that we “invented” for the Kindle screen. This form allows a maximum of 10 lines and 25 characters per line (including spaces)–the most that will fit on a Kindle screen when it is set at Font Size 6 (though Font Size 4 is, in my opinion, the best size for reading most e-books). Douglas Florian called this form the “Kindlekuku” and we acknowledge in the intro that it was cuckoo to limit our poets to 250 characters per poem–but we think the poems are terrific!

Particularly in English-speaking countries, a common concern is the lack of diversity in children’s books. How do you think e-books might address such concerns, and how has your work engaged with issues of multicultural children’s books? 

More and more people are discovering the authors in themselves and soon will be using e-books to make their voices and stories heard. This is such an exciting time to be involved with books. There will be lots of awful books, just as there are lots of awful YouTube videos–but there will also be indie-published gems. I anticipate an explosion of diversity in subject matter and also books offered in many more languages. For instance, one of the e-books I’m working on is a ballad about the first famous Chinese poet, Qu Yuan, and the origins of the Dragon Boat Festival, that will appear in a bilingual Mandarin/English edition. I’m looking forward to publishing e-book versions of several of my books in several languages, from Korean to Lithuanian!

On a similar note, in the twentieth century the development of children’s rooms in public libraries marched hand-in-hand with growth in the children’s publishing industry. Do you think e-books will change the roles of traditional libraries, and how do you envision e-books reaching children of all incomes and backgrounds?

Thousands of copies of my e-books Once Upon a Tiger: New Beginnings for Endangered Animals and PoetryTagTime have been downloaded by children in Ghana and Kenya through the terrific Worldreader.org program–books that would’ve cost a fortune to ship to Africa. The newest Kindle includes a $79 version; with the abundance of free and cheap books, these e-readers might be the best way to reach children in circumstances where traditional libraries are not an easy option.

We love sneak previews! What are you working on at the moment? Do you plan for it to come out in print, as an e-book, or both?

Right now Sylvia and I are finishing up GIFT TAG, an anthology of holiday poems. This is the third book in our PoetryTagTime series. It will be available as an e-book for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, phones–and computers, too (many people are just discovering that they can download the free Kindle app to their regular computers). The book begins with a Thanksgiving poem by Jane Yolen and contains a reminder of the meaning of Christmas by Lee Bennett Hopkins, a whimsical dreidel poem by Douglas Florian, a Mew Year’s Day poem for cat-lovers by Children’s Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis, and 23 more poems about everything from getting your first bicycle to your first bottle of perfume, being a spider in a Christmas tree, and having your Christmas stocking pop!

If you were a fortune-teller, where would you predict the future lies for the evolution of the printed book vs. the e-book generally? 

Too often I hear people say something negative about e-books, followed by the phrase, “because I love books.” I love both ice cream and frozen yogurt; can’t we have both? I’ll make a bold prediction: e-book poetry anthologies will actually make print collections of poetry more popular than ever. I think a lot of people who are new to poetry will take a chance and spend $2.99 to buy an e-book anthology like PoetryTagTime, which will lead them to discover a bunch of poets that they’d never heard of before. You can’t read Allan Wolf’s poem in P*TAG about burping up kittens in Shanghai without wanting to read more of his work–which is currently mainly available in print books only.

What’s up next on your to-read e-book list? Do you have any favorite e-books that you’d recommend?

Each week I have a new favorite! Today’s favorite, though, is an OLD book: Opposites by Richard Wilbur. The line drawings come through really well on the Kindle, and the poems beg to be read again and again, of course–even just one poem at a time, when the mood strikes. That’s a great thing about a poetry book: you can read it a poem at a time and not feel like you’ve “lost your place”–and the poems are so short that you can read one on your phone while you’re waiting in line!

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Thank you, Janet.

And the good news is that since doing the interview, Gift Tag has been released and is now available to buy… Time to get e-reading!

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Carol at Carol’s Corner.

[Sara Hudson joined our team of contributors last year, bringing her perception and love of children's books to the book reviews she has written for us. You can read more about her on our About Us page, including an allusion to her travels that have centered on book collections around the world (and, in fact, we first met Sara at the International Youth Library stand at the Bologna Book Fair last year...). With this post, Sara introduces a short series focusing on e-books for children that will include an overview of multicultural e-books and interviews with two authors who have embraced the e-book format, Janet Wong and Hazel Edwards.

e-troducing the e-book

The degree to which debates about e-books can polarize begins to make sense after we consider how we often frame their presence as a question of alleged murder. “Will the e-book kill off traditional books?” It’s the perennial question at the front of the mind of cultural critics and librarians hovering at the back of any crowd rushing out for the latest Kindle, iPad, Nook or other e-reader. In turn, the question of e-books draws its roots from deeper long-standing concerns, those surrounding the question “Is the book dead?”

Despite decades of worry, the book is not, in fact, dead; nor has the e-book yet killed off traditional books.  E-books developed from work in the mid-1970s to create image- and text-based publications for computers – themselves still a fairly new and ungainly technology. Advances in technologies and software programs ricocheted the development of e-books and their subsequent e-readers forward in the 1990s. Today e-books are visual and/or aural publications readable on digital devices, which often cost a fraction of the price of traditional books, and offer the advantage of portability and accessibility to large numbers of texts at once.

That said, the e-book industry remains in its infancy, and its approach to all books, especially those for infants and children, evolves every day.  E-book readers pose considerable technical issues. Amazon and Apple, two companies historically known not to play well with others, if at all, both have proprietary restrictions, so buyers can only read book purchases on Kindles or iPads, respectively (although you can download a Kindle reader to your PC). Additionally, as evidenced by the overarching debate about e-books, “Will they kill off traditional books?”, e-books evoke enormous emotional responses from readers. “Traditional” readers argue, for example, that reading a book on a machine cannot substitute for reading a physical book, that the medium is part of the message, that a machine is a sterile substitute for the tactile experience of reading.

The emotional questions of e-books reveal themselves nowhere as strongly as they do with e-books for children, particularly picture books aimed at early readers. As this recent article from The New York Times reports, “[e-books for children] represent less than 5 percent of total annual sales of children’s books, several publishers estimated, compared with more than 25 percent in some categories of adult books.” Children’s e-books present practical arguments (teething toddlers + expensive electronics = definite disaster), practical unknowns (when do bells and whistles enhance and when do they distract?), and questions of the practices of adults themselves, particularly those of middle class income, many of whom rely on their own ability to flip through a book – or that of a librarian, teacher, or fellow parent – to select it for bedtime reading.

Over the coming weeks, PaperTigers will explore questions at the intersection of children’s books, multicultural books and e-books. We’ll interview two authors who have written e-books, survey a sampling of multicultural children’s e-books, and start to frame some of the different perspectives that go into writing, illustrating, distributing and creating e-books for children. There’s sure to be a lot of ideas and opinions about e-books – don’t keep them to yourself; please join in the discussion by leaving a comment below…

Enjoy illustrations from 2011 Spirit of PaperTigers book Biblioburro and other books by Jeanette Winter in our online Gallery. The majority of Jeanette’s books are inspired by real people and events: in her recent interview with us, Jeanette said:

I am drawn to true-life stories, and true stories that relate to world events. Stories about brave and courageous individuals are personally so inspiring to me, and I want children to know about these people. I feel that children have the capacity to understand the big issues of our lives, if in a simplified way.

Her books certainly succeed in drawing out the essence of the people and situations she profiles, in a way that makes them memorable and inspiring for children. For example, I love her book (included in our Gallery) Mama: A True Story, in Which a Baby Hippo Loses His Mama During a Tsunami, But Finds a New Home, and a New Mama (Harcourt Children’s Books, 2007) because really the story is told in the title. With only a few speech bubbles calling “Mama!” among the visually stimulating illustrations, the turmoil and ultimate reassurance are conveyed without over-frightening small readers.

A vibrant illustration from Biblioburro fronts Jeanette’s Gallery. It tells the true story of Colombian teacher and literacy advocate Luis Soriano, who founded his donkey library to take books out to remote villages and ensure that children have access to help with their schoolwork. Read this post from True Tales and a Cherry on the Top for a beautiful anecdote that exemplifies why he got started; and watch this video:

Abigail Sawyer regularly reviews books for us here at PaperTigers, and she’s also, in her own words, “a lifelong library lover and an advocate for access to books for all”, so who better to write an article for us about “unconventional libraries” and the children’s books they have inspired. Abigail lives in San Francisco, California, USA, where her two children attend a language-immersion elementary school and are becoming bilingual in English and Mandarin: an experience that has informed her work on the blog for the film Speaking in Tongues. I know you’ll enjoy reading this as much as I have.

On Traveling Libraries and Heroic ‘Book People’: Inspiring children’s books about getting books to people in remote places and difficult circumstances

My sons and I paid our first-ever visit to a bookmobile over the summer.  For us it was a novelty.  We have shelves of books at home and live just 3 blocks from our local branch library, but the brightly colored bus had pulled up right near the playground we were visiting in another San Francisco neighborhood (whose branch library was under renovation), and it was simply too irresistible.  Inside, this library on wheels was cozy, comfortable, and loaded with more books than I would have thought possible.  I urged my boys to practice restraint and choose only one book each rather than compete to reach the limit of how many books one can take out of the San Francisco Public Library system (the answer is 50; we’ve done it at least once).

The bookmobiles provide a great service even in our densely populated city where branch libraries abound.  There are other mobile libraries, however, that take books to children who may live miles from even the nearest modern road; to children who live on remote islands, in the sparsely populated and frigid north, in temporary settlements in vast deserts, and in refugee camps.  The heroic individuals who manage these libraries on boats, burros, vans, and camels provide children and the others they serve with a window on the world and a path into their own imaginations that would otherwise be impossible.

Shortly after my own bookmobile experience, Jeanette Winter‘s Biblioburro (Beach Lane Books, 2010), a tribute to Colombian schoolteacher Luis Soriano, who delivers books to remote hillside villages across rural Colombia, arrived in my mailbox to be reviewed for Paper Tigers.  I loved this book, as I do most of Winter’s work, for its bright pictures and simple, straightforward storytelling. Another picture book, Waiting for the Bibiloburro by Monica Brown (Tricycle Press, 2011), tells the story of Soriano’s famous project from the perspective of one of the children it serves, whose life expands beyond farm chores and housework thanks to Soriano and his burros.

I was moved, of course, by Soriano’s story, which got me thinking about another favorite picture book my children found at our branch library a few years ago: That Book Woman by Heather Henson (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2008) is a fictionalized account of one family’s experience with the Pack Horse Library Project, a little-known United States Works Progress Administration program that ran from 1935-1943.  The Pack Horse librarians delivered books regularly to families living deep in Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains.  In this inspiring story (more…)

Myra Garces-Bacsal of Gathering Books fame has just written a Personal View for us – “A Delectable Taster of Picture Books from Singapore”:

Ever since the birth of Gathering Books a year ago, I have endeavored to know more about children’s literature in Singapore, the Little Red Dot that is my current home now. When Marjorie emailed me about putting together my Personal View on children’s books in Singapore, I knew I would have a tough time – but an enjoyable one as well. And being the researcher that I am, I headed straight to the library to immerse myself in more and more children’s books written and illustrated by Singaporean authors.

Among the qualities I observed from the variety of picture books that I took pleasure in reading was that most of the narratives (1) are informative; (2) are meant to educate or share some knowledge concerning an individual’s developmental disorder/illness; (3) highlight some environmental issue or societal concern; or (4) provide some random fact about animals, place, or groups of people. Given that Singapore is an excellence-driven society with a high premium on education, this does not surprise me at all. Despite the country’s being a ‘tiny red dot’ on the map, I continue to be amazed at the variety of picture books that are available that so effectively demonstrate the richness of Singapore’s heritage and history.

Head on over to the PaperTigers website to read the rest of Myra’s article, including her selection of picture books… I guarantee that you, like me, will be trying to work out a way to get hold of them! Here’s a delectable taster:

Adeline Foo is the best-selling author of the Diary of Amos Lee series, as well as many picture books, inluding Guai Wu:The Chinese Elf and a series of heritage books that highlight the unique Chinese-Malay-Eurasian hybrid culture of the Singapore Peranakans. Here are a couple of tasters from our new interview with Adeline:

I know in five years’ time, the scene for e-books or e-publishing is going to change drastically. People are talking about audio books and books on iPhone. Even kids as young as two are able to navigate around an ipad, so there may come a day where only classics get re-issued in print, because they have justified their shelf life in the children’s book market, but for first time authors, the direction might be to jump straight into e-publishing, thereby bypassing the need to incur cost in printing.

I was very pleased when I found a book on mating behaviours of spiders. I found it very funny that a spider’s courtship ritual is so similar to a human’s! Because my publisher warned me that I couldn’t use anatomically specific words, I had to look for alternatives, and I thought naming an arachnid’s mating organs would not get me into trouble!

As you know, most authors do not get to meet or talk to the artists in America, but in Singapore, we do things more consultatively, and the community of authors and illustrators is small.

You can read the whole interview here…

Head on over to the PaperTigers website to read Mr. Ramachandran’s article Writers and Illustrators Emerging on the Singapore Scene.

Mr. Ramachandran is the Executive Director of the National Book Development Council of Singapore (NBDCS). Over the course of his career as a librarian, including in his role as National Librarian of Singapore, he was always actively involved in the NBDCS, serving as its Honorary Secretary and subsequently as its Chairman. Following his retirement from the National Library, he was appointed Secretary General of the International Federation of Libraries and Institutions (IFLA). In 2006, he was invited to become Executive  Director of the NBDCS, in order to bring to fruition the vision he had had for the organisation during his term as Chairman. One of the initiatives he has brought into being is the acclaimed Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC), an annual event that has now been running for two years. You can read our recent interview with Mr. Ramachandran by clicking here.

Head on over to the PaperTigers website to read our interview with R. Ramachandran, Executive Director of the National Book Development Council of Singapore (NBDCS).

Here are a few snippets -

About why the Asian Children’s Writers and Illustrators Conference, which has since grown in to the Asian Festival of Asian Content (AFCC) came into being in 2000:

As a librarian I realised that the availability of children’s literature with an Asian focus was limited: limited in number, that is. And those books that were available were not attractively produced and were aggressively marketed. The good books produced by the Asian diaspora were too expensive and again not readily distributed in Asia. Asian children were not reading about themselves. The books that were being read were not set in an environment that they were familiar with and could relate to. In the meantime, schools and libraries were being developed. The need for materials for Asian Children was urgent.

About the work of the NBDCS:

Organisations like ours must continue our efforts to impress upon people that stories, reading and writing are fundamental, no matter what form they take and no matter how technology develops.

And about the future of the book:

I still see scope for books as we know them. But a book will have to become a work of art, a niche publication that combines the beauty of paper, words and art on paper, packaged and presented in all its glory to the reader. Such a book will always have a place and a market, even as technology advances and impacts on book publishing as a whole. Like libraries, books will not perish. They will embrace technology, and reinvent themselves as a niche player. [...]

What concerns me, though, is that there appears to be a lack of confidence among publishers to rethink and use the changes in technology to present the book in all its might and glory, and to exploit its unique features to retain the readers and buyers.

Rama certainly provides food for thought – what do you think?

Read the complete interview here.

Last year in Singapore a new children’s literature conference was launched: The Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC). Organized by the National Book Development Council of Singapore and The Arts House, the mission of the AFCC was (and is) to foster excellence in the creation, production and publication of children’s materials with Asian content in all formats and to facilitate their distribution and access, first in Asia and then to children worldwide. The AFCC noted:

Over a billion children in Asia lack good resources, both for their education and entertainment. Those who have the means and the access, benefit from a wide selection of edutainment material available from the West. Asian material, even those available, is seldom promoted and is therefore left unexplored. Bringing quality Asian content to children is paramount as it would make children aware of Asia’s unique environment and cultural values, promote understanding of, and love for, the literary and visual arts. It will thereby lay the foundation for a good and all-round education. This will benefit parents, teachers, librarians and children in Asia as well as the world.

The inaugural AFCC festival was a huge success with over 400 participants from 17 countries attending, and dates were promptly set for the 2nd AFCC to be held 26 – 28 May 2011. Here at PaperTigers we were eager to attend the 2011 festival, especially when the opportunity arose to conduct an AFCC panel discussion with Tarie Sabido (Asia in the Heart, World on the Mind) and Dr. Myra Garces-Bacsal (Gathering Books.org). So on May 23rd I departed Vancouver, Canada and headed to Singapore, brimming with excitement and enthusiasm (and a wee bit of nervousness at the thought of my panel presentation) and eager to take part in all the AFCC had to offer.  I was thrilled at the thought of this opportunity to meet other like-minded individuals all eager to discuss Asian children’s and young adult literature.

This was my first time visiting Singapore and I was immediately struck by how perfect a spot it was to hold a festival that focused on the gathering of people from Pacific Rim and South Asia countries. Singapore’s geographical location has resulted in the the country historically being a gathering spot for people of many ethnicities and religions.  The majority of Singaporeans is of Chinese descent (74% according to the 2009 census); 13.4% are of Malay and 9.2% of Indian descent. There are four official languages: English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil; and multiple religions are represented. The multicultural flavor of Singapore is represented in the distinct ethnic neighbourhoods – Chinatown, Little India and the Arab Quarter – as well as the large number of religious buildings, some of which have great historical significance. The Singapore government recognizes the importance of racial and religious harmony and, of course, this is something that we all would like to see promoted and reflected in children’s literature.

To be in such a multicultural city and then to have even more cultures represented, as attendees arrived for the AFCC from countries such as Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Japan, Malaysia, USA, and Canada, was truly amazing. Each day of the Festival was jam-packed with activities and it was truly an incredible experience to be surrounded by people from all over the globe who shared such a passion for children’s literature. The venue, The Arts House, an almost-200-year-old building that was Singapore’s first Parliament House, was steeped in history and tradition and was the perfect spot to host the festival.

Needless to say, I took many photographs. As well as those of Singapore shown above, below are some of my favorites from the AFCC itself – and you can see more in an annotated slideshow here. And so, to answer Festival Director Dr. Rama’s question about whether the AFCC can be considered to be the Bologna of Asia, my answer is a resounding YES: and I certainly hope to be able to attend again in 2012!!!