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Usability
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Graphics / Interface
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Kid friendly
A great selection of children's books for the iPad.
One of the things my kids loved to do when they were young and continue to do now is read. They love to read. Many of the children have won awards in middle school for reading the most pages/books! What did they get? Giftcards to bookstores! Well if you have kids between the ages of 3 to 8 and are looking to find quality books, then you should download StoriesAlive for the iPad.
StoriesAlive is from the digital publishing company Auryn and is a subscription-based digital library. The app is free and comes with six trial story titles. You will need Internet to initially get going on the app. Since you get six free trial stories, you can easily try the app before you make any purchases. Subscriptions for the service are monthly and there are no contracts. A currently monthly subscription is $7.99 USD. With your subscription, you will be able to download any story you want. There is no limit. Also once you download a book, it will be on your iPad so you will not need Internet to read it.
The app is very well designed and easy to use. You will probably need to give the little ones a bit of help navigating through the app initially. The app has three main sections:
- Library– list of the books available
- Bookshelf– your books
- Account– the specifics for you StoriesAlive account
Within the library you can just browse or hit the menu and get a variety of sections such as Free titles, new releases, age groups, rhymes, etc. Once you find a book you are interested in, you can tap on the cover and get some basic info on the story, author, size. There is also a Look Inside option which will let you read a sample of the book. The app will download it to your app.
Once you download a sample or book you will have three options:
- Auto play
- Read to me
- Read myself
And you will be able to personalize the story by putting in your voice and text of each story!
The app makes it very easy and enjoyable to read with your child or have them read on their own. The app and the subscription service puts a huge selection of quality children’s books at your fingertips. Since there is no long term contract, there really isn’t much to lose. So if you are looking for great children’s books for your iPad, give StoriesAlive a look.
As a side note, I do not think this app is really designed for kids to find books on their own. I would definitely get the books for the kids and then give them the iPad with the book already loaded, but again you will need to determine what you child can or cannot handle. But if they enjoy reading and want to learn, they should have no problem handing StoriesAlive.
