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Scholastic is the largest publishing company in the world that deals exclusively with kids books. To take advantage of the growing digital reading segment, they launched their Storia eBook store in March 2012. What does it take for a traditional publishing company to migrate away from their comfort zone and initiate shift to digital media? Today, we talk to Scholastic on the evolution of Storia and what the future may hold. Deborah Forte is President of Scholastic Media, and Executive Vice President of Scholastic Inc. She talked a bit about the formation of the Storia group and how the entire project came about. “We have a rich and well established realtiosnship with parents, teachers and kids. When looked at the market, we needed to be poised to deliver a solid e-reading experience to kids and we were looking for software to power and deliver content to our customer base. There was nothing currently on the market that suited our needs and we decided to bite the bullet and develop our own platform.” Storia officially launched in March 2012, but it was in development for a very long time before customers got their hands on it. Deborah elaborated “We started three years ago on Storia and we probably spent around nine months doing our research, looking at our library of books, creating our value proposition and gearing up operationally to be able to deliver on all of that. It was a very small team initially but we had the ability to tap into a very advanced network within our company and we were able to leverage the expertise from around the company. It was very important to use that we be platform agnostic and appeal to users on iOS and Android.” A year and a half before Storia launched to the world, they held a series of test groups, exclusively with kids. Deborah elaborated on the testing procedure – “The first group we tested the initial beta with, was a group of kids. If they did not like it, it would not work, if they weren't delighted and not engaged, we knew we wouldn't be able to roll it out. So we had a few kids testing sessions and it went extremely well. There were features that were validated, such as our pronouncing tool. This tool works by clicking on a specific word the user clicked on and they would hear an audio pronunciation. We found that with our Storia platform, even the most reluctant readers were turned on to reading.” Obviously Storia resonated well with children, but when they started showing it to teachers, they got a massive amount of feedback to take the eBook reading app in an entirely new direction. Deborah explained “When we originally developed Storia, it was designed to be an end-user application that allowed parents to buy books for their kids. After the beta and we started showing it to teachers in the classroom they all were clambering to use this system in the classroom. So, we developed a series of new tools for our reading manager. This allowed parents and teachers to track the children’s reading habits, how many page turns they made and the length of time it took to read a book. We feel very lucky at Scholastic that we can tap into the feedback of the teachers and have an immediate response from the development team.” When Storia first launched the platform mainly showcased their own eBooks, from their extensive library of traditional kids content. The success of the platform started to attract some of the largest publishing companies in the world, such as Harper Collin, Hachette and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. These new relationships bolstered the sheer amount of eBooks Scholastic was able to offer and there is now over 650 digital titles available. One of the things that makes the Storia platform different, is the enhanced eBooks they offer. These include quizzes, interactive puzzles, and video for kids to interact with. There are also read aloud features that can narrate the book in its entirely for your youngster. Deborah drove home the point that “There is no arbitrary games that provide a distraction, but an enhancement to our eBooks.” What does the future of Storia hold? Deborah Forte finished up the interview by saying “Our plan right now is to by the beginning of September to have Storia available on MAC, PC, IPAD, Android Tablets and Kindle Fires. We really want to make sure our platform is available and accessible to the widest audience possible. We also intend on releasing more detailed reporting information for teachers and a new suite of enrichment tools. One thing we are putting a priority on is our new short reads program. Teachers want short form eBooks in their classroom because they don’t have a lot of time in the classroom. Often they have a paltry 15 minutes to engage in individual reading, and we want to be able to offer them very short books that can be read in ten or fifteen minutes. We also want to start producing shorter video clips.” Scholastic Discusses the Evolution of their Storia eBook Store is a post from: E-Reader News |
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Scholastic Discusses the Evolution of their Storia eBook Store
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