Disney adds e-books subscription website
LOS ANGELES - The Walt Disney Co. hopes an ambitious new digital service it plans to unveil today will transform how children read its storybooks.
Disney Publishing plans to introduce a subscription-based website, DisneyDigitalBooks.com. For $79.95 a year, families can access electronic copies of hundreds of books, from “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too’’ to “Hannah Montana: Crush-tastic!’’
The service, aimed at children ages 3-12, is organized by reading level. In the section for beginning readers, the books will be read aloud, with each word highlighted on the screen as it is spoken.
Another area is dedicated to children who read on their own. Find an unfamiliar word? Click on it and a voice says it aloud. Chapter books for teenagers and trivia features round out the service.
Publishers, of course, have been experimenting with e-books for the youth market for years. About 1,000 children’s titles are now available digitally from HarperCollins. Scholastic has BookFlix, a subscription service for schools and libraries that pairs a video storybook with a related nonfiction e-book. “Curious George’’ is available on the iPhone via Random House.
But some e-book observers are impressed by the Disney effort. “There isn’t anything like Disney’s product on the market,’’ said Sarah Rotman Epps, a media analyst at Forrester Research who got a sneak peek at the website.
By pursuing a subscription online model, as opposed to focusing on downloads and sales for devices like the Kindle, Disney is placing a bet about where the market is going, at least in the next three to five years.
The move could send ripples through this corner of publishing, if only because of the size of Disney, which sells 250 million children’s books a year.
