Bookseller Children's Conference

Last week, we headed to the British Library for this year's Bookseller Children's Conference exploring digital publishing.

The morning's sessions focused on how children and young people are currently engaging with the new digital landscape, with a range of speakers including Adam Khwaja from BBC Children's, and Divinia Knowles from Moshi Monsters. Throughout the presentations, it became clear that digital technologies play an increasingly important role in the lives of children and young people: today, 52% of 9-year-olds and 95% of 15-year-olds have mobile phones; 88% of 8-15 year olds own a games console; and 28% of under-6s have a TV in their bedroom. Given all this, it's perhaps unsurprising that statistics from the US indicate that 25% of children have already read a book on a digital device, and 57% would like to. Parents are also part of this digital revolution: 83% would encourage their children to read on an e-reader, and they are increasingly giving their iPhones and iPads to children to play with.

Dr Sue Cranmer, Principal Researcher from Futurelab picked up on this in her presentation, discussing the idea that children born in the last two decades are digital natives. In other words, they have always been surrounded by digital media, whilst those born pre-1980 are digital immigrants, who are far less confident in using new technology. Given this, there is a digital disconnect between children and their teachers and parents.

However, Dr Cranmer was keen that we shouldn't accept this idea at face value. Although many children use the internet regularly, there are still 10% of children who don't have access; and Futurelab research has shown that children are not as digitally literate as many believe. For example, most children believe everything they read online is true, and have no idea of the laws relating to digital media, indicating that children using technology still need lots of support from teachers and parents. Dr Cranmer discussed how digital technologies can be used to support learning - for example in Futurelab's Consolarium project which explored how computer games like Nintendogs and Guitar Hero can be used productively in the classroom - but stressed that mediation from the teacher was key to the success of projects of this kind.

Transmedia was another key theme from the morning's sessions - story-based projects which cross a number of different platforms, from film/TV to social media to web to mobile to traditional publishing. Matt Locke from Channel 4 talked about how new technologies are changing the way that content is shaped: now content is organized by consumers in ways that suit them, rather than by the producers.  New 'shapes' for content include: live events such as reality shows and political debates; content bingeing, such as watching a box-set of a TV show in one go; and play - short bursts of attention that build up to create something bigger, for example in the case of games like Farmville or Words with Friends, which users play for 5-10 minutes a day.

The afternoon sessions explored how children's publishers are already engaging with digital media. Digital publishing now counts for around 7% of all publishing activity and this is increasing rapidly, though some production costs are high.

In developing digital publishing for children, publishers such as Mike Richards from Egmont and Fionnuala Duggan from Random House stressed the importance of working with strong brands. Effective marketing and publicity, partnership working, use of social media, and incorporating parental controls are all important - yet above all, it is the quality of the content - the story itself - that remains key. Kate Wilson from Nosy Crow was one of the few voices to raise the interesting question of what the role of the publisher might be in a world of disintermediation in which it is increasingly easy for authors and illustrators to produce and distribute their own content directly to readers.

Yet throughout the day, speakers continued to stress that children want offline experiences as well as online ones. Statistics indicate that 66% of children still want to read books on paper; and publishers agreed that paper books will continue to exist alongside e-books for a long time to come…

Here are some of our favourite examples of digital publishing for children and young people that were shared on the day:

Apps

• Winged Chariot's Scruffy Kitty - a digital cat story with a special layer that will magically appear on Halloween
  
• Nosy Crow's Three Little Pigs - a 3D fairytale
  
• Alice in Wonderland - Alice comes to the iPad
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Online

• Scholastic's 39 Clues - join in the game to find the clues and defeat the competition 
  
• Perseus Books' Cathy's Book - read Cathy's diary or download the app to follow her story
  
• HarperCollins's The Amanda Project - who is Amanda and where is she now? Help to tell her story
  
• Templar's Alienology -  a 'close encounter of the digital kind'
  
• Penguin's Spinebreakers - a space for teens to explore books