Thursday, April 15, 2010

Nosy Crow appoints digital product director reveals apps

14.04.10 | Benedicte Page in The Bookseller

New children's independent Nosy Crow, run by former Scholastic UK m.d. Kate Wilson, has a new digital product director, Deb Gaffin, and is launching an "Appiness" division this autumn with apps for iPhones and other devices.

Gaffin has joined Nosy Crow after moving to London from New York, where she worked for 10 years at Scholastic Inc, most recently as vice president of Kids & Parents Online. She said she was "excited to join a smart, nimble start-up that's thinking of digital from the very beginning", adding that she was "hoping to establish partnerships with creatives of all sorts to help Nosy Crow forge ahead in this dynamic area of publishing".

The first Nosy Crow apps will be launched in September, with titles from two interactive series: Animal SnApp and 3-D Fairy Tales. Animal SnApp: Farm will be an interactive game with embedded interactive story, "taking as their starting point the capabilities of touch screen devices to create reading experiences that are new and different, in which solving a fun puzzle prompts a story." It will be followed by Animal SnApp: Safari and Jungle.

Meanwhile The Three Little Pigs will be a debut illustration project by Edward Bryan, using audio and animation, with the stories unfolding in a 3-D landscape that children can explore and interact with. Wilson said: "When we saw Edward's illustrations we saw something that we knew no-one had seen before. We knew that we didn't want to squash books onto a phone, and this was a brilliant example of how the capabilities of the touch-screen device transformed and enhanced the reading experience."

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