The beauty of a web 2.0 site is that your users innovate with the tools you give them.

We originally saw the site as a book publishing tool. But Jennifer Poulter, an educational author form Australia, saw in Sharing-Books a tool to publish one page books that she calls poster-poems as classroom aids to help students learn poetry and/or help teachers introduce discussion topics relevant to their classes. The form of the poster-poem has been received well and Jennifer's work has been used in classrooms around the world. One of our authors, Urs Dietrich, who wrote Miki Makes a Promise, reported that on his last trip to Odessa, he visited a classroom where Jennifer's poster-poems were used to teach English.

Now it is author Timothy Schenk who published last week a surprise he had hinted was coming. Timothy has previously illustrated two poster-poems written by Jennifer. He also wrote and illustrated My Pretty Pointe Shoes that won the second prize in the July 2009 Simone Woods Awards. This time Timothy published our first talking book: Fan of Halloween.

Fan of Halloween demonstrates Timothy's technical know-how as he took advantage of a new feature Adobe introduced to PDF files, the ability to insert flash files. So as you download what looks like a normal and relatively small PDF file, you also download a little movie and a recording of Timothy reading his poem. When you click on the image of the pumpkin on the page, the pumpkin moves in as Timothy reads the poem.

This is very exciting and very promising. We deliberately limited the file type of our books to PDF so that universal distribution would be easy and that given the small size of the files, our books could be downloaded in low bandwidth regions of the world. Obviously this limited the books in being two dimensional. Now we can see the form of the e-book developing new and valuable attributes. Imagine a PDF e-book where a child can click on a cow and hear it go Moo! Or have an alphabet book read to them or having technical details added to a science book.

We thank Timothy for innovating with this first book and showing the way to one more imaginative use of Sharing-Books.com

Labels: children books, digital publishing industry, e-books, Halloween, J.R. Poulter, new features, picture books, publishing, teaching english, technology, Timothy Schenk

October through February is often known as flu season. Exposed to a host of germs in classrooms around the world, posters in libraries and doctors' offices alert parents and caregivers to ensure their children wash their hands and cover their mouths when they cough. Sometimes, those children who need to be tucked up in bed are back in school, still infected, because their parents have to rush back to work. Those, at home, find themselves covered in blankets, noses running and glands swollen, and feeling all crotchety. As a young boy, the famous author Robert Louis Stevenson often found himself ill at home, under the careful eye of Nurse Cunningham. Like your children, he watched the world outside his window go by.

Thankfully for us, Stevenson captured some wonderful insights into his world of Victorian England, and created such memorable poems as "The Land of Counterpane" and "Picture-Books in Winter." Published in our 1907 edition of A Child's Garden of Verses, it has been a popular read for many years. So today, give your tyke a crisp copy to read under the covers with a flashlight. He will keep warm, and before long he will be imagining himself as 'the captain of a tidy little ship', as he slumbers off to "The Land of Nod."

Labels: A Child's Garden of Verses, children's books, children's ebooks, flu season, picture books, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Land of Nod