On iPads and Reading and More…

The DNA recently covered one of our favourite friends, Brij Singh from Fliplog – they created the iPhone applications for us and Tulika.

From the article:

Apptility has kicked off its e-publishing project by tying up with Indian publishers Tulika and Pratham Books to transform some of their popular children’s titles, such as Tulika’s Ekki Dokki and Pratham’s Annual Haircut Day, into e-books.It also has plans of creating ‘from scratch’ e-books for the iPad and other tablet devices. The start-up has published about 20 books, including nine in the children’s category, within a few months of launching Fliplog, and there are many more in the queue.

Marrying the multi-lingual variety available in Indian children’s books with iPad technology has been one of the high points. If you download one of the multilingual books, Tulika’s The Runaway Peppercorn, for instance, users get a page-by-page multilingual audio and can switch between a Hindi/English version and a Tamil/English version. This is especially useful for children growing up in multi-lingual householdsor ones in which parents find it difficult to introduce kids to vernacular languages.

And we love the fact that the Creative Commons model got a shout out too:

The coming together of Apptility and Indian publishers willing to let companies like them digitalise their books was largely serendipitous. Pratham Books licences its content under open, Creative Commons licenses that allow Apptility, and anyone else, to use them without requiring negotiations, provided the terms of the licence are followed, says Gautam John of Bangalore-based Pratham Books. “We hope Brij and other organisations will reuse this content in ways that will continue to surprise us,” says John.

You can read the full piece here.

Don’t forget, our iPad/iPhone application and Tulika’s too!