| Living Books | |
|---|---|
| Parent company | Random House/Brøderbund |
| Founded | 1989 |
| Status | Later bought by Scholastic Corporation after Brøderbund was purchased by The Learning Company |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Location | Eugene, Oregon San Rafael, California Novato, California |
The Living Books series is a series of interactive animated multimedia children's books, first produced by Brøderbund and then spun off into a jointly-owned (with Random House) subsidiary, which were distributed on CD-ROM for Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. The series began with the release of Just Grandma and Me (an adaptation of the book by Mercer Mayer) in 1992; other titles in the series included The Tortoise and the Hare, Arthur's Teacher Trouble (and other adaptations of books by Marc Brown), Dr. Seuss and Berenstain Bears titles.[1]
Living Books became quite popular in the mid-1990s and were even used in some classrooms to teach English. Some home-computer users reported purchasing CD-ROM drives and sound cards specifically to run Living Books.
Many of them had selections for other languages, such as Spanish and Japanese in US releases, and French and German in European ones.
The series did have an official website, www.livingbooks.com[2], but after the series was canceled by Broderbund, the site was up for grabs and bought by Scholastic. It was then converted into a jungle book series website that sold books published by Scholastic.
Contents |
† = Only English is available as a language for this Living Books program
Almost all the CD-ROMs in the series give the user the same four options:
Publishers Weekly, in a review of Dr. Seuss' ABC, called that title "one of the best children's CD-ROMs to date" and stated that, "[...] the producers' fondness for Dr. Seuss and their fidelity to his sense of refined silliness spill into every sequence."[4] Simson L. Garfinkel and Beth Rosenberg found that the CD-ROMs played better on Macs than on PCs. Although they found the titles to be of high quality in a market flooded with "questionable" releases for children, they stated that not all of them lived up to the company's educational claims (noting Dr. Seuss' ABC and Arthur's reading Race as exceptions) and felt that the added dialogue supplementing the book's text was sometimes "out of character". [5] Arthur's Teacher Trouble, The Tortoise and the Hare, Ruff's Bone, and Little Monster at School all received a very high score of over 90.00 in the book CD-ROMs Rated by Les Kranz; in the review for Little Monster at School, the graphics and the number of clickable areas were described as positives.[6]