Living Books

» see livingbooks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

just grandma and me shipped in three languages and turkish was never going to be the fourth. that is the whole distance here, and it is a sharper one than usual, because a living book was not software that happened to contain english. the english was the product. you clicked a word and the machine said it back to you.

i was eight when the first one came out and fourteen when the line ended, which is very nearly the correct age. wrong country and wrong hardware, though. a cd-rom drive was not standard equipment on a home machine in ankara in 1993, and the discs that did circulate arrived with no box and no license attached to them.

broderbund shipped just grandma and me on 7 february 1992, adapted from the mercer mayer picture book. it sold well enough that broderbund and random house signed a partnership agreement on 9 september 1993 to build an entire line on the format, fifty-fifty, trading from january 1994. random house brought the publishing relationships. broderbund brought the harder half, which was knowing how to make a page feel alive without turning it into a game.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

the format was fixed early and it was the right format. a page of a picture book fills the screen. the computer reads it aloud, highlighting each word as it goes. then the page is yours. every object on it is clickable, and clicking does something small and completely pointless: a mailbox opens, or a rock turns out to be a turtle.

nothing was scored. nothing was timed. there was no way to lose, which meant a four year old could be left alone in front of it for an hour, and that is what put four hundred thousand copies of just grandma and me into american homes by 1995.

~ the seuss deal ~

in april 1994 living books signed dr. seuss, and it is worth stopping on how unlikely that was at the time. the estate had guarded the brand carefully for decades and had never put it on a computer. living books went after the digital rights hard the moment it became clear they were unclaimed, and shipped dr. seuss's abc, followed by the cat in the hat.

by december 1996 the line held twelve percent of the educational cd-rom market, second behind disney at thirteen point two. for a category that had not existed five years earlier, finishing second to disney is not a failure.

~ the actual end ~

random house left first. on 18 january 1997 broderbund bought out its fifty percent stake and dissolved the joint venture, bringing the line back in-house. the last new title was d.w. the picky eater in 1998, another marc brown book out of the arthur catalog.

then the ceiling came down on the parent instead of the product. the learning company completed its all-stock acquisition of broderbund on 31 august 1998, and in september announced five hundred layoffs along with the closure of the petaluma production facility. living books was never really canceled. the people who made it were simply removed.

~ the long tail ~

the catalog then traveled the same road as the rest of broderbund, through mattel interactive and riverdeep to houghton mifflin harcourt, ending up owned by companies with no particular reason to open the files. in 2010 a group who had worked on the originals licensed them back and began reissuing them as wanderful interactive storybooks, on tablets, where a finger pressed against a picture book makes considerably more sense than a mouse ever did.

the odd thing about a living book is how well it dated. it was never trying to look like the future, so it never became the past.

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