EVERYTHING GONE COMPUTER...YUCK

I've noticed that Richard Scarry's animation has gone from a nice painted background look to all colored digital. YUCK.

This is what it used to look like:



This is what it looks like now (please excuse the non-english - it was a better resolution)


I think it's a real shame. Everything these days is DIGITAL DIGITAL DIGITAL. 3D!!!! YAY! Seriously? I watched Avatar like that and it gave me a headache. Those old Disney cartoons a great!

I could only find a remix to Alice in Wonderland, but it's pretty cool:

A GOOD USE FOR THE IPAD

When I was in VA for my school visit a week ago I was talking to a librarian about the translation of books to digital. Of course I'm not the most thrilled person with the whole idea so I expressed that. She told me that she has my book Balto on her iPad and said she projected it in front of her class. The book looks great on the iPad and the nice part is that it can be read aloud in front of the class with the pictures displayed nice and big. No one is left out when the book is projected!

So... I guess these digital things do have their uses.

AAARRRRRGGGG!!!! MY UGLY DIGITAL BOOK!

People want to know why I complain about picture books going digital. I feared the worst and the worst has come true for one of my books. My book Pop looks great on the apple products but my book Balto looks TERRIBLE on the Nook. I mean it. Really, truly, awful. I want to take photos to show as an example and perhaps I can pull this off. I don't want to get caught taking photos of the device while at work though. I was told that there are two different ways that the book can be displayed on the color Nook and that the programing for my book was sent in in the ugly format. I wonder why there are two options to begin with?

So I will try to explain how it looks. The first option (the good option) is for the book to look like the book (and this is how Pop looks on the Apple products). The second option - and this is how my book Balto is displayed in an awful manner - is for the text to be removed from the art and for the book to be displayed like a novel. The art is cut up in pieces and displayed here and there--sometimes at the top of the page, sometimes on the next page, sometimes blown up X200 so that it looks super bad... and the font can be changed to anything. So basically the book is BUTCHERED in the most enormous way possible. You certainly cannot read it to a child in the manner in which it is displayed on the device. It's just a joke.

I'm sorry but these things have a LOOOONG way to go before they think they can sell picture books fairly. I'd want my money back! Grrrr.

You may not believe how bad this actually is so stay tuned for photos (if I can manage).