picture book

Some children story apps have incorporated a reflexivity typical of the metafictive picturebook but this reflexivity is altered in the digital medium by the possibility of interaction – as the reader is addressed by the story, there is in interactive texts the possibility of a response that affects the narrative. The construction of metafiction is also changed by the extended multimodality of these texts, that now incorporate movement and sound, for example, creating a different kind of immersion from that promoted by the image-writing dynamics of the print picturebook. In this paper, I will discuss the realization of metafiction through the participation of the reader in the app The Monster at the End of This Book (Stone & Smollin, 2011).

(Source: Author's Abstract at ICDMT 2016)

The market for children apps is growing at a fast pace and already represents a considerable share of the global supply, both in term of downloads and distribution (See figures and reports on appfigures.com). Despite the relative paucity of literature on games and edutainment, the variety of contents available is wide and includes adaptations of classic and contemporary texts, as well as original contents specifically conceived for digital environments. Our contribution aims to consider a sample of this rich production, especially focusing on a corpus of adaptations of classic and contemporary children picturebooks, selected for their large panel of literary-significant multimodal [KRESS 2010 ; LEBRUN – LACELLE – BOUTIN 2012] and hypermedia elements [BOLTER – GRUSIN 2000]. “

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)