Being a grown-up can be fun

In comedian Weird Al Yankovic's picture book debut, When I Grow Up, eight-year-old Billy enthusiastically discusses his many (mostly improbable) career options, from "snail trainer" to "friendly mortician" to "giraffe milker." The app adaptation (HarperCollins, June) takes this tale a step further—augmenting Weird Al's text and Wes Hargis's illustrations with simple, but effective animation and sound effects. Most screens include a few interactive extras (e.g., close-ups of Billy's homework assignments and imagined accolades, snails that slide back and forth along a tightrope) that come to life when users tap, swipe, or tilt their device. Games like "Xtreme Snail Race," "Gorilla Masseuse," and "Tarantula Shaver" allow the user to experience some of Billy's potential professions first-hand. You can play each game just as the associated job is mentioned; if you prefer to wait until the end of the story, all are easily accessible from the main menu.

What really makes the app is Al's own excellent narration. The litany of bizarre occupations can feel a little overly long when reading it yourself, but his perfectly timed, just-over-the-top-enough performance adds life and warmth to the wackiness. Weird Al fans will appreciate his cameo as Billy's classmate in the illustrations, emphasizing the message that any kid can grow up to live his wildest dreams.

The app is available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch ($3.99 in the app store).

—Katie Bircher

Gardening with The Lorax

As the public becomes increasingly worried by climate change and deforestation, Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, originally published in 1971, may be more relevant than ever before. With its unforgettable characters and sentiment, the classic is an entertaining and informative way of introducing young children to environmental issues.

Unfortunately, The Lorax Garden app (Oceanhouse Media) pales in comparison. The aim of the app is to restore barren forests by digitally raising flowers and Truffula trees. The process of doing so is unnecessarily complicated and seems to involve more steps than growing an actual tree. First, you must choose one of five locations, each with a forest in need of a facelift. To be successfully revived, every forest needs a different amount of full-grown Truffulas, ranging from three to nine. In the world of The Lorax Garden, raising a Truffula tree requires a combination of “care hearts,” water, and time. When you enter a new location, you receive ten care hearts, but they run out quickly. Though the needed number varies, it can take more than half of your allotted care hearts to raise one full-grown Truffula tree. To get more care hearts, you must grow one of six varieties of flowers, requiring water, pollination, and weeding—all in under a minute, as the section is timed. Growing each type of flower differs in difficulty and in how many care hearts you earn. Are you confused yet? Me too.

Here’s what I know for sure: reviving one of the forests in The Lorax Garden is a fairly significant investment of time. Add the time it takes to grow flowers to that required to grow a Truffula tree and you’re looking at well over an hour to restore a forest of nine Truffulas. But don’t worry: you probably won’t finish. Unless you’re one of those people who have to finish what they’ve started, you’ll be frustrated and/or terribly bored after growing just one or two Truffula trees. And if The Lorax Garden can’t hold the attention of a book- and garden-loving adult like myself, it surely won’t be a pleasant experience for children.

So do yourself and your children a favor. Forgo The Lorax Garden app. Read the picture book with your kids and use the $1.99 the app would have cost to buy a sapling or some seeds—real ones, not the pixelated kind brought to you by the Apple device of your choice. Plant them in your yard and bring The Lorax to life. Dr. Seuss would have preferred it that way.

—Laura Marenghi

At home with Kids and Home

Despite its title, RedactiePartners MediaGroep’s Kids and Home app ($.99, recommended for ages 4 and up) features no children and a wide variety of buildings, few of them actually homes. However, it serves as an adequate introduction for young children to different architecture around the world. The first part of the app resembles a nonfiction picture book; each screen introduces a particular structure, mentioning a unique feature of the building and how it differs from the narrator’s own house (for example, “This is the Taj Mahal. It is in India. It was built as a monument to love. My house was built to be lived in”). Only very general facts are given on the main part of each screen, instead giving focus to a photograph of the structure itself. A light bulb in the upper right corner, once tapped, becomes a pull-down fact sheet about the location with more detailed information and trivia. Each screen includes a related (if somewhat lackluster) interactive element; for instance, on the Big Ben screen a double-decker bus beeps and drives across the photo. Although so many—over twenty-five—pages become repetitive, they do allow the user to explore a diverse range of structures, from houseboats to cathedrals to the pyramids.

The second part of the app allows users to customize a home. Essentially a virtual sticker book, this feature lets users select the location of their home (e.g., Mars, underwater, a desert) to its accoutrements (e.g., columns, solar panels, and weather vanes). Another sticker book–ish section offers images of vehicles, animals, etc., to play with, while yet another section invites digital painting. I used the app several times and each time found the creative parts challenging to work with. I had trouble making the pieces of my home stay where I wanted them and saving my finished picture. Theoretically the user can send their "dreamhouse" by email or upload it to Facebook, but after I saved the image of my home I was not able to upload it. Overall, the app is less user-friendly—and less interesting—than I had hoped it would be.

—Kazia Berkley-Cramer

5+ questions for David Carter

Pop-up whiz David A. Carter recently collaborated with Ruckus Media on Spot the Dot, a concept-learning app where users search for colored dots in increasingly complex settings. The kaleidoscopic screens of brightly colored shapes roaming around black backgrounds are exciting just to look at, but even better is the way the app engages users in interactive play. Much of the fun lies in seeking (rather than finding) the dots. Users move a flashlight-beam–like circle to illuminate a black screen and locate the orange dot, while the green dot—alongside shapes of all colors—swells and “pops” before reappearing. David was kind enough to tell us a little about the process of making Spot the Dot.

How is creating an app like creating a movable book?
Creating the app was similar to creating a movable book in the sense that both are interactive; I try to integrate the interactivity into the concept. I try to avoid using the interactivity in a book or an app simply for show. You will also notice that my concepts take advantage of the hands-on nature of the medium, whether by asking a child to lift a flap to find an answer to a question or to touch the screen to move the app forward. In both cases the reader must be actively involved and use their fine motor skills.

What particular challenges come with the app format as opposed to working in print?
The greatest challenge in creating the app was understanding the capabilities of the device and the programming, and then figuring out how to apply the concept. With paper books, through many years of experience, I have a deep understanding of how to use paper engineering and the printing and assembly process to convey and integrate my ideas.

Do apps have elements analogous to the pop-ups of a movable book?
I like the fact that with pop-up books and apps, the reader is actively involved by touching the art. In both mediums we ask the reader to not only read the words and view the images but to touch and interact with the art.

How does your past life as an advertising illustrator inform your current work?
As an artist and illustrator I think in and communicate with images and color. In the past few years I have been using simple shapes and colors in a non-representative way, like modern art, to express my concepts. I like these non-representative images because they allow the reader to interpret the idea through their own mind. Kids will say that a pop-up looks like an ice cream sundae or a roller coaster. That's the viewer filtering the non-representative art through their own experience.

Which of the puzzles/screens are you most excited about?
My favorite playspace changes from time to time, but I really like playspace nine, the black dot, because it is a bit magical. The images are invisible until you touch the screen in the right place. I also love the fact that as you touch the images you hear various musical sounds—you can play these sounds like a keyboard. I often go to this playspace just to play music.

That’s my favorite, too! What would your younger self think of Spot the Dot?
With the app as with my books I do exactly that: go back in my mind to little David Carter and run that test. That is what I call my “gut feeling” when decisions need to be made. I can tell you that little David Carter likes this app, especially the bright colors, surprises and the sounds, and that little David Carter can't wait to see what's next.

Any plans for a How Many Bugs–inspired app?
I am thinking about how to adapt all of my titles and ideas, including the Bug series, but most of all I'm thinking about new concepts specifically for apps that use the technology in clever and entertaining ways. I hope my art tickles your mind and as always, please touch the art.

Spot the Dot is $3.99 in the App Store (or try it out with the free “lite” version).

—Katie Bircher

Learning in the age of apps

While our sister publication School Library Journal tracks major national changes in school library technology, local news also emphasizes that "things are changing fast": Boston's free daily newspaper The Metro reports that area public schools are turning to iPads for their classrooms. Boston Public elementary schools are trying a pilot program offering iPads to students on the autism spectrum, while Burlington High plans to purchase an iPad for each student.

Which sparks some fascinating—if as-yet unanswerable—questions: how will e-publishing evolve as digital resources become a bigger part of public school curriculum? What criteria will (or should) administrators and teachers use to select ebooks and apps for their students? And, as SLJ editor Brian Kenney asks, what do we do about the "digital divide" between schools that can afford to keep up with ever-changing educational technology and those that can't?

—Katie Bircher

Let's get lost

Children’s author/illustrator Roxie Munro has collaborated with OCG Studios to create Roxie’s A-MAZE-ing Vacation Adventure. Sixteen screens of mini-mazes make up a gigantic maze that takes players through cities, farmland, freeways, and wilderness. Along the way, users search for hidden numbers, letters, and objects.

Munro’s characteristically detailed illustration style gets revved up here. As in her books (Mazescapes, Amazement Park), the mazes are complex and varied: roads and footpaths lead to a slope to ski or a river to raft, with dead ends disguised as construction sites, road blocks, driveways to private homes, or roundabouts. The landscapes are full of tiny, often interactive, vignettes, like a zoo with elephants that trumpet and a field that blooms with flowers. One especially effective screen places amusement park rides along a footpath; following the path triggers each ride to begin moving. Similar both in concept and in organization to Mazescapes, the app’s interactivity is heightened as kids tap the screen and make things happen.

Another cool feature is the ability to move from the default car to other forms of transportation (including a canoe, a raft, and a hot air balloon) in order to explore different terrains. Not every vehicle is steerable—it’d be fun to actually control the plane, for instance—but it’s still satisfying to figure out what vehicle to use to overcome obstacles and move on to the next part of the maze.

At first, I was unsure for what age group Roxie’s A-MAZE-ing Vacation Adventure is intended. It requires no reading and asks players to identify numbers and letters, which would indicate a younger audience; the mazes and seek-and-find are challenging enough for older kids and even adults. But when I learned that Munro and developer OCG Studios intended to make the app accessible for players internationally, the lack of reading makes more sense. The app is rated ages 4 and up, but given the complexity of the mazes I’d suggest a minimum of age 6.

OCG Studios has a fascinating making-of blog here.

—Katie Bircher

Blow the house down!

Crows normally freak me out—their carrion-eating, raucous-cawing ways give me the willies. But when it comes to kids' apps, two Crows seem to know what they're doing.

Loud Crow Interactive (producer of the awesome PopOut! The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Sandra Boynton apps) had better make room in the nest for Nosy Crow, whose The Three Little Pigs is an app-only retelling of the familiar tale.

Nosy Crow's story is faithful to the traditional tale with a few original touches, including making one of the porcine siblings a girl and having the brick-building pig be the youngest one. While the narrative doesn't offer much that's new, the illustrations and interactive features are clever (though not problem-free) and imaginative. Users can choose to read the story themselves, be read to, or be read to and play along. I was skeptical about the decision to use actual kids as narrators—I was worried they'd sound irritatingly perky, like the kids on Barney and Friends—but these young readers' performances are refreshingly unaffected and engaging. Their delightful British accents don't hurt, either. Hearing the wolf's and the parents' lines delivered by child readers takes a little getting used to, however.

There are lots of interactive elements to draw kids into the story, so many that it slows the story down (which may be not a bad thing, since the story will be familiar to most users). New and cool to me: at the prompt, users can choose to help the wolf huff and puff by blowing into their iPad's microphone. (If you share your iPad with a lot of people, though, you may want to opt out.) It's hard to know when you've exhausted all the things to do on a page (flip the characters, make them speak, move items on the page, shift the perspective on the page) and can proceed to the next page, but multiple viewings may help with this problem. And speaking of multiple viewings: it's frustrating not to be able to skip around in the story; to revisit a particular page, you have to go through the whole thing again. Page by page.

Nosy Crow's "Three Little Pigs" is an auspicious debut, and I look forward to seeing what they hatch next.

—Kitty Flynn

Tag!

As Roger reports, PoetryTagTime is a new ebook-only anthology of 30 original, interrelated poems. Each distinguished children's poet "tags" the next poet in line, connecting each poem topically (moon to sun, sun to sunflower, etc.) to the ones before and after it. The PoetryTagTime Tips blog offers ideas for sharing the poems with kids one-on-one or in a classroom setting.

The 30-poem collection is just the right length for sharing a poem a day during National Poetry Month, but with contributors including Douglas Florian, Calef Brown, Lee Bennett Hopkins, and Nikki Grimes, it's sure to be a hit with budding poets and poetry lovers any time.

And April's not over yet! For more poetry, check out Roger's post about Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out and Read and the recommended poetry booklist on our website.

—Katie Bircher

My Very First App

From coloring books to flash cards, baby journals to stuffed animals, adaptations of Eric Carle’s tissue collage illustrations seem endless. Night and Day Studios has reshaped Carle’s work for the iPad, releasing My Very First App in December. This was the first of the company’s two apps adapting recognizable artwork into children’s games (see January's Peekaboo Forest, featuring the artwork of Charley Harper).

My Very First App turns images from Carle’s My Very First Books series into matching games. In "Easy" mode, the screen is divided in half; players scroll through sets of images to find corresponding concepts (e.g., purple and grapes). The "Medium" level requires users to flip over cards two at a time and pair images directly (grapes and grapes), while the "Hard" level asks users to pair different but related images (again, purple and grapes) while a narrator explains the relationship between the two.

In virtualizing the real-world card-matching game, Night and Day Studios has eliminated the possibility of lost cards and the necessity for pick-up, and the dimension of matching related but nonidentical images extends the app’s playability. Though children may quickly tire of matching the color and animal cards that come pre-loaded, there are additional card sets for purchase (but at $1.99 for the app and $.99 for each additional set, this could quickly become one of the pricier apps on your iPad).

From the chewed-through pages of The Very Hungry Caterpillar to the twinkling lights of The Very Lonely Firefly, Eric Carle's books revel in both whimsy and envelope-pushing. Comparatively, My Very First App is a beautiful but somewhat underwhelming take on a traditional card game—and has lost much of Carle’s magic in the process.

—Elizabeth Parks

Public Service Announcement

Children's Technology Review is a monthly Consumer Reports-like PDF newsletter "designed to summarize the latest products and trends in children’s interactive media." They review lots of children's apps, of course, and they've ventured into book app territory, as well. Their focus, natch, is on the quality of the technology rather than the text and illustrations, but they got it right when they included Loud Crow's Popout! The Tale of Peter Rabbit on their list of Best Apps for Kids of 2010.

Hide-and-Seek with Charley Harper

The modernist wildlife artist Charley Harper died in 2007, but his work lives on via books and merchandise featuring his recognizable art. It was only a matter of time before an app appeared, and Night and Day Studios has taken the challenge. Their Peekaboo Forest reconfigures elements of Harper's paintings and silkscreen prints (such as Foxsimiles, Weasel, and Octoberama) into a series of forest settings that change with the seasons. Rather than a story, Peekaboo Forest falls somewhere between a concept book and a game: touch an animated peeking-out tail or ear to reveal a labeled forest creature, accompanied by audio of the animal's sound and name.

The app features three narrators, in English and Spanish, who can be turned on and off. My favorite is the child narrator (credited as 3-year-old Hazel), who's adorably exuberant if occasionally harder to understand than her adult counterparts. The animal sounds are also optional -- but what's the fun in turning those off? Offering the choice to turn off narration while keeping animal sounds is a smart move, allowing sound to act as a clue to each creature's identity without having the answer imposed upon you by some know-it-all narrator. The sounds are sometimes surprising: along with the typical ribbits, buzzes, and squeaks, there are snorting and chomping noises. Some "peekaboos" are unexpected, too, as when eyes glowing in the dark illuminate a pack of raccoons.

While gorgeous and well-conceived in many ways, Peekaboo Forest does have some flaws. The order of animals' appearance is dictated by the app, rather than the user. Frustratingly, there's no way to skip from season to season or animal to animal; in order to see foxes in the fall, for instance, you have to make your way through winter, spring, and summer at 3–4 animals per season. The animations are non-repeatable, though a "loop" option allows you to cycle through the year indefinitely and catch 'em next time around.

Harper's boldly colored, geometric nature art -- with plenty of eye-catching patterns -- is well-suited to this kind of educational game, and Night and Day has nicely reimagined his work for a new format and young audience. I'm looking forward to seeing what the company does next (and hoping they work out a few kinks).

-- Katie Bircher

App Smackdown

Eileen Christelow’s Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed (HMH) and Sandra Boynton’s The Going to Bed Book (Little Simon) are probably on most toddlers’ bookshelves. How do the app versions of these popular titles compare to the books and to each other?

Oceanhouse Media’s Five Little Monkeys takes the high road. Less about bells and whistles and more about improving reading skills, this app features unobtrusive monkey noises and other sound effects accompanying static illustrations. Tap objects on the screen and the word for said object appears briefly along with the narrator saying “pajamas!” or “ice pack.” Does that feature “promote reading in young children” (per OM’s website)? I’m no reading specialist, but I wonder why we need to "promote reading" among this book's audience. Read to your bunny, sure, but work on word recognition? Way to suck the life out of a good storytime. Even if the narrator wasn’t irritatingly chipper (which she is), I found this good-for-you route to be dull -- no improvement over or substitute for the old-fashioned book or audio book. And if you choose to turn off the narrator, why not just pick up the book, which is easier for little hands to hold anyway?

Loud Crow Interactive, in my admittedly limited experience with these things, knows how to produce book apps (check out their Peter Rabbit -- it’s superb), honoring the original book while adding just the right amount of special-effects pizzazz. With Sandra Boynton’s The Going to Bed Book, I'll even go so far as to say that Loud Crow’s digital interpretation is superior to the print edition. Blasphemy? I guess that depends on what you feel a book app should be. I’m not suggesting that this app replace the book, because once a child is distracted with rocking the boat, popping bubbles, and wiping steam off the screen (totally cool) they're not going to pay much attention to Boynton's verse. Speaking of which, Billy J. Kramer’s soothing, accented narration and the quiet, gentle background music enhance the whole experience. Like Oceanhouse, Loud Crow’s app highlights each word in the text as it’s being read, a harmless if pointless exercise for the board-book set. Here, however, when you slide out an onscreen drawer, instead of hearing and seeing the word drawer, a bunch of pajamas pop out of the drawer and fall all over the screen. Tip the screen side to side and the jammies tumble to the left and the right. Just the kind of surprise this audience likes, and just the kind of thing that apps do best.

-- Kitty Flynn

"It's your Day of all Days! It's the Best of the Best!"

As you may have noticed, yesterday was Dr. Seuss's 107th birthday (and the 14th annual Read Across America Day). I celebrated by drooling over the unbelievable Dr. Seuss-themed goodies over at Cakewrecks and making a birthday card for the good doctor with an app from Oceanhouse Media:

 

I really would have liked to party with Michelle Obama and a gigantic Cat in the Hat, though. How did you celebrate?

-- Katie Bircher

Celebrating Virginia Hamilton

I recently read and reviewed The Other Side of Dark by Sarah Smith, a book about the ways slavery and the Underground Railroad still haunt us (both metaphorically and literally). It had me wanting to reread The House of Dies Drear and wishing my copy were with me in Boston rather than in California at my parents' place.

Luckily for me and other Virginia Hamilton fans, Open Road Integrated Media has just put up seven new ebooks by the Newbery and Coretta Scott King award (and three-time Boston Globe–Horn Book award) winner. The ebook versions of Dies Drear and novels M.C. Higgins, the Great, Cousins, Anthony Burns, Zeely, Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, and The Planet of Junior Brown feature new covers and biographical info. Open Road has a great mini-documentary about Hamilton on their website. Be sure to also check out author Pam Muñoz Ryan's touching "Letter to Virginia Hamilton," written for Ryan's Virginia Hamilton Literary Award for Multicultural Literature acceptance speech last spring. While the release of these new ebooks is timely for Black History Month, I hope that recognition of black history -- and the incredible legacy of Virginia Hamilton -- is a year-round celebration.

-- Katie Bircher

I'm feeling verklempt.

We saw a critic's pros and cons regarding children's apps; yesterday's Boston Globe presented those of parents.

Here's your topic: are children's apps educational and entertaining, or mind-numbing and soul-sucking? All of the above? None of the above? Discuss amongst yourselves.

The drama of the page-scroll

I have to admit to having some trepidation in reviewing children's apps. It's clear that book-related apps for kids are a different animal from kids' books -- but how different are they? Is what makes a good app the same as what makes a good book? Can I still talk about "the drama of the page-turn" when there aren't any pages to turn? I was relieved to see that Betsy Bird shares her criteria for reviewing children's apps (plus several apps she finds up to snuff) in the latest issue of SLJ.

I'm oohing and ahhing over apps she recommends, like Winged Chariot's The Red Apple and Loud Crow's PopOut! The Tale of Peter Rabbit. And, new-found review criteria in hand, I'm looking forward to exploring them myself.

--Katie Bircher

Bells and whistles and steam, oh my!

Donald Crews's Caldecott Honor book Freight Train, beloved by train-crazed toddlers for decades, will win even more fans with the new app available from HarperCollins/Curious Puppy.

With the app's interactive elements, even kids who can recite the book backwards and forwards will find surprises. As each component of the train, from red caboose to black engine, is introduced, it latches onto the car before with a satisfying clunk. Exploring the the many-hued cars uncovers windows and doors that slide open to reveal staff and stock, freight that can be unloaded and reloaded, billowing smoke and pouring water. Once the train is ready to go, it whizzes past cityscapes and countryside, through tunnels, and out of sight to the strains of a randomly-selected train-themed folk song like "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" or "I've Been Working on the Railroad."

The simple, logical presentation of concepts that makes Freight Train so enduring works just as brilliantly here -- with the added bonus of ringing bells and blowing whistles.

Like the book, the app is also available in a Spanish-language version, Tren de carga.

-- Katie Bircher

Where the wild things bounce

Quick question: which would you rather read, a book that tells you reading is fun, or a book that is fun to read? Judy Sierra and Marc Brown's Wild About Books, first published in 2004, manages to be a little bit of both, as bookmobile librarian Molly McGrew turns a whole zoo onto the pleasures of the printed word: "She even found waterproof books for the otter / Who never went swimming without Harry Potter."

Reading-is-fun books tend, unsurprisingly, to come to foregone conclusions, but the messagey nature of this one is ameliorated to a great extent by Sierra's witty and expert rhymes and Brown's illustrations, packed with animals to find and count. And the book gets a huge boost in appeal in its new iPad iteration from Random House. Placing aside discussion of the irony of a digital celebration of print for another time, let's just look at some of the added value of this new edition. Younger kids who might miss some of the book's in-jokes (about reviewing, for example, harrumph), can still enjoy poking the scorpion to hear his stinging critiques ("Stinks."), and every screen offers similar opportunities to make the animals jump around, hoot, or, in the case of the hyenas reading a joke book, laugh like, er, hyenas. Balls can be tossed about, clouds can be moved around in the sky; the giraffe's neck makes a satisfying sproing when pulled down and released. What gives the book a real spring is its apparent three-dimensionality: the pictures are put together in layers which reveal themselves when the iPad is moved; tilting the device to the right or left causes new bits of the pictures to emerge and even small movements give the pictures an agreeably gently bounce. One caveat: do the reading aloud yourself, as the supplied optional narrator has that over-perky talking-to-children tone that we professionals had trained out of us in library school.

-- Roger Sutton

Book or busy box?

Mike Austin's A Present for Milo is Ruckus Media's first app created expressly for the iPad and lacking a print predecessor. The story is simple: Milo, a kitten, chases a mouse through the house until they reach -- surprise! -- a birthday party. This is all perfectly acceptable board book material given added dimension here by a plethora of finger-poking opportunities: a framed painting of a sailboat reveals an octopus when touched, another mouse can be found playing in a ball of yarn, hit the light-chain and the room goes dark, each effect accompanied by crisp sound effects. Austin reads the printed text aloud (barring words like boing or bounce, which are represented by sounds and visuals instead) but it's easy to lose its thread what with all the hidden effects and noises to discover (the mouse in the flying saucer is my favorite) before swiping to the next scene. If not particularly characterful, the pictures are cleanly drawn and offer lots to point at--just mind your finger, as you never know just what is going to pop next. $1.99 at the iTunes store, recommended for 2-4 year-olds.

-- Roger Sutton

Dispatches from Transylvania

"To my son, my husband, and my cell phone." -- iDrakula's dedication

Bekka Black’s new novel iDrakula (Sourcebooks Fire) retells Bram Stoker’s classic epistolary story entirely through digital communication, including text messages, email, and websites. This “e-pistolary” format itself is still unusual, but it’s quickly gaining ground, particularly for teen readers (see Elizabeth Rudnick’s Tweet Heart, published in June).

Black streamlines Stoker’s plot and takes some liberties in recasting his characters. Abraham Van Helsing becomes Abe, a med school cutie, rather than a distinguished professor. Jonathan Harker, as a cheating boyfriend instead of a doting husband, makes way for Mina Murray to pursue a new romance (and steal the limelight). Still, non-purist Stoker fans will enjoy this reimagining as a loving homage to the classic; readers up on their vampire lore will chuckle at allusions like “Tepes Travel” and “Ask Vlad” search engine. As in the original novel, readers must fill in the gaps between communiqués to finish the narrative; what’s left to the imagination can be even creepier than what’s included.

Sourcebook’s iDrakula app for iPhone and iPod Touch manages to fill in some of these gaps without limiting the reader’s interpretation. The app -- a hybrid of e-book, cell phone novel, and radio play -- incorporates the whole text of the novel, plus additional audio of phone calls and voicemails between characters. Content opens day by day for fifteen days to unfold the plot in real time. (Impatient readers can opt to unlock everything at once.) The one-day-at-a-time pacing and the act of scrolling sharpen suspense, though users unfamiliar with the story may be confused by the way some messages open out of order. The blood-spattered, cracked iPhone image of the app lends a sense of foreboding to even innocuous messages.

The app is free to download and sample for the first five days of the novel, but beware: the freebie ends on a cliffhanger.

Like Loser/Queen, it remains to be seen how the paperback itself will fare. Readers who encounter iDrakula in paperback will probably seek out the app for additional content, but I doubt the app with its extras will promote sales of the physical book. I hope that readers thirsty for more after reading Black's retelling in either format will seek out Stoker’s novel (if they haven’t already) to really scare themselves silly.

-- Katie Bircher