Scholastic | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Poison Apple Books Alert! Check Your Kids’ Scholastic Book Club Flyer

In a recent post, I mentioned the Poison Apple Books as a series for the beginning reader who is looking for something spooky. Lo and behold, the books showed up on parent/teacher radar in the November book order from Scholastic. If you are the parent of a child who brings home Scholastic book orders from school, and would like to acquire these for your newly independent reader, they are available as a set in a slipcase in the” Holiday Gift Books” flyer for November 2012 at 55% off (the flyer is a little odd, in my opinion, as it contains both Goodnight Moon and The Hunger Games, but nobody hired me to market to kids and their parents and teachers, either). A six-pack of the Goosebumps Hall of Horrors books(which I know nothing about, except that it’s written at a 2nd-3rd grade reading level) is also available at 50% off. Parents are encouraged to order online, where the entire family of flyers for all the book order books at all grade levels are available, but unfortunately these are time sensitive. So if your child did not bring home a book order, you might want to contact the teacher, find out the classroom code, and see what’s available there.

The Transmedia Trend: Scholastic Jumps on the Bandwagon

The translation of storytelling across multiple media that creates this has a name- transmedia. And publishers are starting to recognize that this is a trend that they need to pay attention to. There have been a fair number of apps that have created interactive versions of books (The Monster at the End of This Book is a huge favorite here) and there are “read to me” ebooks, which my kids also like, but mainstream children’s publisher Scholastic looks to be taking things a step further.

Publishers Weekly reports that Scholastic is partnering with Ruckus Media to create an imprint called Scholastic Ruckus. Not only will this imprint produce interactive storybook apps, but it will provide digital content concurrently with the publication of children’s books (as opposed to having the digital content be “after the fact”), and it will create transmedia properties- a variety of versions of a story told across multiple platforms, which will include not just print copies, but film, gaming, online formats, and other interactive media experiences. I like that Scholastic is embracing this trend and will be interested to see what comes out of the new imprint. But Scholastic is a children’s publisher and so now we will have a generation of kids that expect a lot more from storytelling than what they can see on the printed page. Will it limit their imaginations to have other people’s visions of their reading experience surrounding them , or will it expand them? I don’t know. I can tell you this though: in spite of how exciting I think immersive experiences and transmedia can be, I’ll take the printed page (and the occasional live performance) any day.