Living Books is a series of interactive read-along adventures aimed at children aged 3β9. Two decades after the original release, the series was re-released by Wanderful Interactive Storybooks for iOS and Android.
The series began in as a Broderbund division that started with an adaptation of Mercer Mayer 's Just Grandma and Me. The company continued to publish titles based on popular franchises such as Arthur , Dr. Seuss , and Berenstain Bears. Broderbund was acquired by The Learning Company , Mattel Interactive , and The Gores Group over the following years, and the series was eventually passed to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , which currently holds the rights.
The series was kept dormant for many years [ 3 ] until former developers of the series acquired the license to publish updated and enhanced versions of the titles under the Wanderful Interactive Storybooks series in The initial motivation behind the series came from a childhood fantasy of Mark Schlichting's to enter into the picture book world of Dr.
Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! Seuss and the magic of animation through Disney. After receiving a degree in fine arts and working as a book publishing art director, he retrained in traditional animation. The then-unknown designer [ 13 ] began pitching the CD-ROM-based Living Books around the company [ 8 ] "to anyone who would listen" [ 4 ] and presented his prototype to demonstrate the concept.
You know how flowers follow the sun? That's called heliotropism. Well, kids have a 'computertropism'". After a few months of development, the first fully-featured prototype for Living Books was complete; [ 4 ] it was an adaption of Mercer Mayer's Little Monsters at School. Mercer Meyer's popular children's book Just Grandma and Me was chosen as the premiere title of the new series, [ 4 ] as their initial attempt at "eras[ing] the line between learning and playing". Now [] a particular title currently takes 6 months to a year.
