76 Facts About Living Books

In 1994, the Living Books division was spun-off into its own children's multimedia company, jointly owned by Broderbund and Random House.

Living Books continued to publish titles based on popular franchises such as Arthur, Dr Seuss, and Berenstain Bears.

Living Books devised a concept of "highly interactive animated picture books for children" that would "delight and engage kids but that had real learning content as well", which would evolve into Living Books.

The title 'Living Books' was chosen to represent that everything in the environment is alive and for the player to experiment with.

Living Books "lobbied his bosses" to allow him start a CD-ROM division that would "add a new dimension to children's books", pitching to increasingly senior staff from his superior Michele Bushneff, to her boss Vice President of Broderbund John Baker, and eventually reaching Broderbund co-founder and CEO Doug Carlston, all of whom offered encouragement in different ways.

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Living Books married this demographic trend to new CD-ROM technology that Schlichting was interested in.

Living Books turned off the mouse cursor until the story was read so they had to watch the words.

Around this time, Mickey Mantle was hired as Broderbund CTO and he became an advocate for his "pet project" Living Books, working closely with the programmers to ensure the work was delivered.

Living Books was considered as a skunkworks project by its team, which they believed was hidden from the main building to shield it.

The Living Books engine "served as the foundation for the entire product line" and the same underlying technology was still being used in 1998, just with better animation and interactive design.

Living Books investigated CD-I devices like Phillips but found the "resolution low, the interface clunky, and the format difficult to work with".

Just Grandma and Me accompanied Tandy's launch in October 1992, and the title suited Tandy's positioning as "provid[ing] fun in the process of learning" instead of being a video gaming console; Living Books users were able to engage with hotspots used their remote control.

Living Books noted, “At this point, we're building engines for each optical platform, so we can just go directly from the data stream to the product, with no programming at all.

Living Books selected to existing picture books or designed books full of scenes that allowed for a wealth of exploration through clicking.

In 1996, Living Books released their first sing-along animated storybook program.

When Schlichting was first designing Living Books, he visited computer stores to observe how software was displayed and marketed, and noted that they used their games' assets to show off the computer's capabilities.

Living Books included the printed versions of the paperback books with the software to ensure there would be continuity where kids could play between the two and to encourage non-digital reading.

Living Books experimenting with 'living' text, where children could tap on any word and hear it pronounced or build the whole sentence word by word.

In 1994, Broderbund produced a supplementary set for teachers called the Living Books Framework, featuring integrated teaching material for each of the first four Living Books titles for $489.

In 1991, Broderbund made the first of its two great contributions to the history of CD-ROM publishing by releasing, as the inaugural title in its children's software arm, Living Books: One of the first CD-ROMs ever, it was an interactive reading primer called Just Grandma and Me.

The new Living Books took over research and development, manufacturing and marketing associated with the creation of its products, which were distributed through Broderbund and Random House' respective channels under an affiliated label arrangement for Windows and Mac.

Unique for a kid's software company, this meant Living Books was created with a "strong, in-house foundation of experience" in all stages of the business, including product development, production, marketing and publicity.

Living Books became "one of the first alliances between dominant companies in their respective fields".

Variety noted that the deal underscores how Living Books "positioned itself as a front-runner in the children's multi-media market", managing to secure a deal with Dr Seuss Enterprises despite "competing companies offer[ing] richer financial packages".

Living Books aimed to publish up to 10 electronic titles the following year, including Dr Seuss titles which would be released at the $40–$60 price point.

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Advertising Age saw Living Books' pending release of their first Dr Seuss CD-ROMs as the industry's "most-watched developments".

In 1997, Living Books had a Green Eggs and Hamulator Scavenger Hunt on their website, with 36 parts scattered across the Internet; the winners were awarded prizes.

Living Books would grow to 100 people and produced a total of 20 titles.

In contrast, Living Books primarily sourced material from classic literature including traditional tales like The Tortoise and the Hare, and enduring children's picture books from well-known authors such as Dr Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham.

On May 24,1994, Living Books acquired worldwide media rights to Berenstain Bears' First Time Books series from authors Stan and Jan Berenstain; the book rights were owned by Random House.

Living Books sought to secure the rights to stories that had already seen "success and acceptance" among teachers, parents, and publishers.

Living Books material touched upon ideas familiar to children, such as in The Berenstain Bears Get in a Fight, where two kids squabble and their parents try to deal with the problem.

Ruff's Bone was second original Living Books story, born from a collaboration between Broderbund and Pictures' New Media Division.

Living Books' narrated, highlighted, and clickable text is identical to that of the book, though the characters sometimes have "conversational asides".

Schlicting observed that Living Books often had a "profound effect" on their original authors; upon seeing Arthur's Teacher Trouble, Marc Brown said it "change[d] the way he thinks about books", and from then on he wrote books with animation and interaction in mind.

Living Books collaborated with Alliance in the design process, inviting them to test Broderbund's software with various assistive devices including screen enlargement programs, such as inLarge, and alternative keyboard access programs, such as IntelliKeys.

Closed-captioned CD-ROMs were virtually non-existent by 1996 and there wasn't an organized effort to encourage multimedia companies to provide subtitles for plot-intensive products; Living Books mostly circumvented this by displaying the story text on screen.

In January 1997, Living Books donated four pieces of software to The Children's Trust after attending a Children's Head Injury Trust awareness week and learning that the Trust had donated a Compaq Presario computer; children with limited abilities played the program via a tracking system produced by Scope's Microtechnology Services.

Living Books began to face growing competition from Disney Interactive and Microsoft in the animated storybook genre.

Living Books became pressured to produce games at a faster pace while retaining their superior level of quality.

However, Salon wrote that the financial struggle of even a reputable company like Living Books demonstrated that the "current woes of the multimedia b[usiness]" couldn't be "blamed simply on bad products".

At this point it was unsure whether Living Books would be folded into Broderbund or remain a separate entity.

In October 1997, Living Books halted half its projects and underwent a staff restructuring of which more than half its workforce including Shon were laid off.

That year, Living Books developed and published its last titles, which were based on the Arthur children's book series.

Living Books had been formerly known as SoftKey until it acquired The Learning Company in 1995 and took its name.

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Living Books enlisted Axworthy as Senior Systems Architect to create a prototype using the series' existing assets which could run on the new technology.

However, as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had let the digital rights – to the children's books on which Living Books were based – lapse, Mantle would have to secure the digital publishing rights directly from each of the authors.

In March 2016, Schon donated to The Strong museum hundreds of materials that document the Living Books' history, including games and company records from between 1993 and 2000.

Living Books titles are currently available through Wanderful Interactive Storybooks' series of app re-releases on iOS.

The Living Books rights are currently licensed from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Newsweek thought that Living Books demonstrated Broderbund was "one of the first companies to experiment with CD-ROMs".

At Disney, Living Books were considered "exemplars of how best to create engaging, enriching, digital story experiences for children".

Anne L Tucker of CD-ROM Today revealed "I'm addicted to Living Books", and wished all her favourite childhood stories could be adaption by the series.

Living Books were the first to use both "read to me" and "let me play" modes, as well as speech-driven highlighting; both techniques have since been widely adapted in children's language app design.

Living Books pre-empted the popularity of the industry; by 1995 the CD-ROM market had "exploded".

Museum of Play wrote that Living Books was the "leader in this effort to upgrade juvenile literature for the digital age".

Living Books became popular and encouraged other developers to follow suit and copy the formula.

Children's Tech Reviews agreed that Living Books pre-empted ebooks by 15 years, deeming them "children's e-books".

Living Books has frequently been used in research papers regarding child learning.

Dust Or Magic, Creative Work in the Digital Age thought Living Books was the sole exception in the CD-ROM publishing 'shovel-ware era'.

Living Books noted that the "attract mode" was so popular that parents would write in to say that their kids had learnt all the moves and would dance along.

Mickey W Mantle, president and CEO, Wanderful reflected ""Living Books has such an amazing legacy, remembered by children, trusted by parents and embraced by the educational community" through "elegant, interactive-rich.

George Consagra, executive producer of Ruff's Bone, thought Living Books were "pioneers in the art of interactive storytelling".

Living Books recalled Schlichting as being difficult to work with, but appreciated the impact he had on children's lives.

Mantle noted that Living Books were "pioneering apps on Macs of a generation ago over" and that over the years they'd "had many requests from Mac-using teachers and parents" to revive the programs.

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Broderbund's Living Books series was perhaps the first example of popular children's stories in print being adapted into digital storybooks that encouraged interactive learning and play in the computer, or at least popularized the animated storybook format through hits such as 1993's Just Grandma and Me and Arthur's Teacher Trouble which were based on popular children's books from the 1980s by Mercer Mayer and Marc Brown respectively.

Project LITT: Literacy Instruction Through Technology found that Living Books had high text interactivity and minimal extraneous games and activities, while Disney's Animated Storybook had medium text interactivity and embedded games and activities.

New Media notes that "nothing sells like a character" that has already been proven in media, noting this strategy used by Disney creating spin-offs of its film and TV projects, and Living Books applying this to a lesser extent with popular books.

The study Talking Storybook Programs for Students with Learning Disabilities found that "Living Books programs appeared more comprehensible to students than the Disney programs".

Game Developer Magazine grouped together Living Books and Big Tuna Productions titles into The Living Book Series, though noted the latter was a pale imitation of the former.

The Photographic Image in Digital Culture thought Living Books was a "successful reworking of children's literature".

World Village felt Living Books "handsomely realized the story" of The Berenstain Bears: In the Dark.

The Children's Trust lamented that Living Books wasn't aimed at an older audience, but wrote that the storybooks were sufficient for their patients due to being "amusing".

The Age wrote that, the "ongoing popularity of adventure games" including the Carmen Sandiego series, Flowers of Crystal and Dragonworld, showed promise that Living Books would "become very popular in Australian classrooms".

Living Books are interactive storybooks – effectively a blend of computer games and hypertext fiction They are "electronic versions of either narrative or expository texts that combine high quality animations and graphics with speech, sound, music, and special effect".

The games are generally adaptions of books from popular children's franchises such as Arthur, Berenstain Bears, and Dr Seuss, however three titles exclusively created by Living Books included Ruff's Bone, Harry and the Haunted House, and a retelling of The Tortoise and the Hare.