Books on computers: format combines text and audio narration is an example of a story that appeared in a number of Canadian venues about a Florida company, AV Books, Inc., that is coming out with a first title on CD where you have can read a book on the screen and hear it in MP3. I can’t believe that this story was successfully placed by the company – companies have has talking books for at least a decade. The first ones I saw were for kids from Discus Books in the late 80s (correction below), then Voyager has a series of books for computers. The only thing new in this story is MP3 format for the audio and there are plenty of people exchanging MP3s for audio-books.
Historical NoteDiscus Books seems to have dissappeared. I found a reference to one of their products at this educational page, 1c.html. Here is the reference,
Keyword: children’s literature
Title: The Tale of Benjamin Bunny
Series: Discus Books
Format: CD-ROM
Located: Ridgely’s Computer
…
Literature Description: A delightful tale of Benjamin Bunny and his cousin Peter Rabbit as they go visit Mr. McGregor’s garden and to retrieve Peter’s clothes and the trouble they almost get into.
Update – I found more information about Discis. It was called “Discis Knowledge Research”, is now in receivership and released its first CD in 1990. See Biography of Joseph Scheuhammer. He writes,
I joined a then new company named Discis Knowledge Research, Inc. They have since gone into receivership, but if you do a web search, I’m sure you will find a link or two.
Our first product line was information rich versions of children’s books on CD-ROM, whose purpose was to help children learn to read. For example, clicking on a word in the text elicitted its pronunciation, an oral context specific definition of the word, and a second language explanation. Clicking on pictorial elements invoked a label of the pictured item, a pronunciation of the item, and a second language explanation. Clicking on a speaker icon at the beginning of a sentence cause that sentence to be read while it was hilighted phrase-by-phrase. We first released product in the summer of 1990. Examples of titles include Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and Robert Munsch’s “The Paper Bag Princess”.
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