Story-books that read themselves: Penguin's interactive Qbooks

Soon bed-time stories will be able to read themselves to your kids. Penguin’s new digital Qbooks for kids bring touch and voice technology to popular children’s picture books.
So you may not need to be there for their bedtime – but you’d better make sure the iPad is.

These digital picture books or Qbooks from Penguin and Kiwa Media are designed to be interactive. Using the Swipe-to-Read function on the story, children will be able to run their fingers across the words and letters and hear the story read aloud as the graphics pop and change color.

Other function Touch-to-Hear allows children to hear the individual word spoken and Touch-to-Spell enables the child to actually hear the word being spelt.
Children and parents can customize each QBook by recording their own voice and coloring in every picture in the book

Penguin first Qbooks are compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch, but I can imagine that it will be on a book-sized device like ooo say the the iPad that this will really be interesting.

This sounds pretty entrancing and though the current examples are quite simple (see video below) the possibility are really interesting. It’s almost a new thing – it’s not really a film, not really an audio tape, not really book.. I guess this is one of the new sorts of media product that we’ll start to see on tablet computers.

QBook available on Windows 7, Symbian & Android in May 2010
QBook launches on iTunes with Sebastian’s Tail (Penguin) and Milly, Molly and the Tree Hut. Coming soon – Flick, The Red Fire Engine, Wheelbarrow Wilbur, That’s Not Junk (Penguin), Oh Hogwash Sweet Pea, Barnaby Bennett (Huia Publishing) and the Milly, Molly series.