When Apple announced last month that it will push to make digital textbooks more available, many bloggers noted just how few titles are available. Well, now there are eight more titles.
Converting some of the most popular Chester Comix titles from printed book to e-book was one of my big projects in 2011. It feels fantastic to look into Apple’s iTunes store today and now see eight of my books ready for download: American Symbols, Founding Fathers, Moving and Grooving, The Jamestown Journey, Go West Young Crab!, World War 2 Tales, GOVERNMENT, and Revolutionary Rumblings.
If you do a search for “Chester Comix” in the iTunes store, you’ll find these books AND the three apps I published in 2010. The books are clearly for the iPad (much too big to be viewed on the iPhone) and the apps were drawings that I cut specifically to be easily readable on the iPhone and iTouch. Those apps can be viewed on an iPad, but they don’t fill the iPad screen. The commercial success of the iPad meant I could present my Chester adventures in their original vertical design. With even MORE vertical-ness! Part of the process over the past few months was making the page layouts that I drew 10 years ago stretch out to fit the iPad screen’s dimensions. For most readers on most pages, the differences between the print version and iPad version aren’t noticeable. But I as the author got more and more excited to see how the added space gave the drawings more room to breathe. I think these iPad versions are more readable for young people, and the history lessons within them flow more easily. The format has helped the storytelling! (By the end of the five-year run of Chester in the Daily Press newspaper in Newport News, VA, I was clearly trying to tell too much story and cramming too many words and detailed images into the space I was given on the page. You could see that I knew the project was coming to an end, and I was trying to say as much as I could in the pages I had left. Some of the Chester pages make me claustrophobic when I view them now 😉
Please help me share this great news about Chester for the iPad. The goal is to get all 27 titles into the iTunes store this year!
Tags: comic book, graphic novel, history, iPad, reluctant reader
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2012 at 10:48 am and is filed under Author's Purpose, Comix Creation, literacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
