Get Set for Screen-Free Week!

Monday marks the beginning of Screen-Free Week, a time to unplug, experience something new, and take time to be present with friends and family. In anticipation, we’ve put together a list of activities to do with your kids that are inspired by some of our favorite new and classic children’s books.  If you have other ideas, share them with us, and let's make sure our screen-free days are filled with fun and imagination!

 So here we go!


 Monday 4/29

Invent a Hugo Cabret Flip Book


If you haven't seen this beautiful--and quite large--book by Brian Selznick, you're really missing out. Though the size of the book makes it look daunting on the shelf, it pages are filled with mostly illustrations that are both accompaniments to the text, and in parts can stand in place of the text. The resulting hybrid is hard to categorize, and reminds us of a combination picture book, collection of film stills, and flip book. We love the creativity of the story, and so to kick off our Screen-Free Week activities, we thought it would be fun to try making a flip book. It might not be as elaborate or large as Hugo Cabret, but what a great way be crafty and give illustrating a shot.

Tuesday 4/30

Cool Cooking

We're putting out our first kid's cookbook this summer, and it happens to be full of easy, delicious recipes from around the world. You won't be able to make the recipes from the book yet (though we did post a rather yummy dessert recipe from it in a past blog post), but that doesn't mean you can't find other great recipes to experiment with during Screen-Free Week. Look for something new and exciting, go get the ingredients, and spend a day in the kitchen with your kids. At the end of the day, you can all sit down and have a meal together. Family time and delicious food, what could be better?

Picture Books and Ebooks: A Winning Combination?

Ebooks are the new frontier of publishing in a fast-paced industry (hello, Amazon’s “used ebooks”). As digitizing becomes more common, new obstacles and innovations unique to the ebook abound. For publishers of titles for both children and adults like Scarletta, the books that pose the most exciting challenge in going digital are picture books.

From the beginning, picture ebooks demanded new technology that adult fiction and non-fiction did not. It was only in 2011 when color display readers were developed and the first picture ebooks were published. Though the picture quality doesn’t compromise the vividness of the illustrations, some aspects can be lost when a print picture book is transferred to ebook form. The two-page spread, for instance, which is a panoramic-like illustration that reaches across two pages, can be accommodated by Apple’s iPad, but can’t be fully appreciated in readers like the NookColor or the Kindle. Fold-out spreads, end-paper art, and different book sizes (think a tall, skinny book about giraffes) are among the embellishments that are unique to print picture books.

And what are the effects of this digital shift on our young readers?

How Are Book Apps Made?

People are always looking for the next thing--the next trend, the next technology, the next market--and for a lot of people, the next thing is apps. Apps for everything. And picture book apps are getting more popular. They move, they play, they read aloud...the possibilities are endless. Okay, they're not endless, but you get the point. There are some seriously amazing things you can do with apps.

Children's books are the perfect print medium to take the plunge into app conversion. They're image based, playful by nature, and full of imagination. Not to mention, the interactivity is great for exploration and discovery. With all of that going on, it's no wonder children's book apps are the new thing we keep hearing about.

And as you may have heard, Scarletta is publishing our first picture book this spring. And not only that, but the book is also in the process of becoming an app. That's right, Nalah and the Pink Tiger will be available as a bilingual app, in English and Spanish, for the iPad! But as exciting as that is--and it's pretty darn exciting--I found myself wondering just what goes into making an app. And since we're lucky enough to have the people who do this sort of thing in our same office, I only had to walk about twenty steps to find the Nalah app designer, Kelly, and ask her some questions.


First things first, there are multiple programs that you can use to develop apps. We happen to use a version of Adobe called DPS (or digital publishing suite) that allows you to create the layouts and animations right in Adobe. So we take the inDesign files originally created for printing, and within DPS we can add all the animations and sounds right to the original pages. We just have to make sure that the spreads are proportionate to the iPad screen, and off we go.