A New Face in the Online Picture Book Market

TumbleBooks.com hopes new and emerging readers will get a kick out of reading online picture books. But these aren't your ordinary, run-of-the-mill electronic books—the company has added sound, animation, music, and narration. E-books are offered in two formats, automatic or manual mode. In the automatic mode, the books run as Flash animations, start to finish, so readers can just sit back and have the prerecorded stories read to them. In the manual mode, kids can turn each page of the book with the click of a mouse.

Leslie Robertson, a librarian at the Catoctin Elementary School in Leesburg, VA, says her preschool special-needs class enjoys reading TumbleBooks. "The sounds were great, the reading quite smooth, and the pictures were bright and colorful," she says, adding that the site is best viewed with a large monitor.

Lesson plans and worksheets have been recently added to accompany each of TumbleBooks's 36 titles. It's part of the new "TumbleBookLibrary in the Classroom" program designed to make the collection a teaching tool. TumbleBooks's 36-book base collection is priced at $300 per school annually with large discounts offered to districts. Teachers and students can access the entire library at any time at no extra charge..