There are tens of thousands of smartphone and tablet apps for kids available on the various app stores, but how many are making much money for their creators? The jury is still out on whether many of the startups making educational and/or entertaining apps for children will turn a profit.
One company that's doing rather well, though, is Oceanhouse Media. The Californian firm has launched more than 300 apps for iOS, Android and webOS, and has sold more than 1m paid downloads of its Dr. Seuss apps on iOS alone.
Its first app wasn't based on a book – music app Bowls: Authentic Tibetan Singing Bowls launched in March 2009 – but according to chief executive Michel Kripalani, Oceanhouse quickly realised there was an opportunity to work with book publishers.
"We saw that we could add value to a book publisher by doing all the technical work to move to mobile," he says. After an early licensing deal with self-help publisher Hay House, the company took a "long shot" and pitched to Dr. Seuss Enterprises.
A one-shot deal to turn How The Grinch Stole Christmas into an iPhone book-app for Christmas 2009 went so well, Oceanhouse asked if it could license more titles. "They said well, why don't you do the whole library of 44?" says Kripalani.
"Entrepreneurship is a matter of being willing to try to do the unexpected, but a big part of it is luck and being in the right place at the right time. We knew there was something here in the market, but not exactly how we were going to fit into it. But we were persistent."
Oceanhouse has since launched book-apps based on other publishing brands, including The Berenstain Bears, Elmer the Patchwork Elephant and Smithsonian.
The company and its licensing partners have benefitted from being recognisable brands at a time when the number of kid-apps is exploding, making it hard for many parents to find the excellent apps amid a sea of… "Garbage!" laughs Kripalani. "There are a lot of problematic apps out there."
An interesting thing about Oceanhouse Media is that the "omBooks" engine it uses for its book-apps isn't packed to the gills with interactive wizardry, compared to some of the rival apps for kids out there.
That's a deliberate choice, explains Kripalani. "We really don't want to substantially add or delete anything that was there in the original books, some of which were printed 60 to 70 years ago," he says.
"Seuss had to choose from a palette of two or three spot colours, and we leave those exactly as is: we haven't gone in and recoloured the pages, and we don't add a lot of animations or bells and whistles."
Kripalani says this approach is backed up by a soon-to-be-released study by the company behind Sesame Street, which he says indicates that too much interactivity might actually harm children's comprehension of the text.
It's an interesting contrast – although note, not necessarily a contradiction – to the views of UK publisher Nosy Crow, whose apps are very rich in animation and interactivity, but which are also developed with the strict proviso that this kind of content must serve the story rather than distract from it.
"Our belief has always been to do a really solid adaptation which reinforces the education and literacy component," says Kripalani.
"We're not trying to create some crazy fancy dancing characters and puzzle games. We just don't think any of that belongs in a book. So in our apps, you can tap on any word that you don't know to hear the individual word spoken very clearly. Those are the tools that the child needs. They don't need to tap on the cat and have him jump up and down and spin around."
What about Apple's recently-revamped iBooks offering, providing tools for publishers to put more interactivity and multimedia in their iOS e-books, as opposed to apps?
For illustrated books like the Dr. Seuss catalogue, the new iBooks might now seem like an obvious distribution channel than the App Store itself. Kripalani chooses his words carefully, keen not to criticise Apple.
"I don't want to knock it, but the simple reality is that the iBooks platform is not yet robust eough for what we want to do. Everything from the way we handle audio and the number of audio channels to the deep level of interactivity when you are touching on pictures and bringing words forward. It's not quite there yet."
However, he also has concerns over whether the new tools may lead book publishers to think porting their titles to mobile devices – particularly smartphones – requires less thought than an app would.
"The problem will be if people believe it is okay to take a double-page spread of a normal children's book, leave the layout the way it is and shrink it down to a 3-inch screen for iPhone," says Kripalani.
"The text will become so small, you won't be able to read it! We solved this problem back in 2009 with The Grinch by putting in a pan-and-zoom system and breaking the pages down into sub-pages. That problem can only currently be solved in app form."
That problem is also currently being solved on Android as well as iOS, with Oceanhouse having been notably bullish in its support for Google-powered smartphones and tablets – in contrast to a number of its book-app rivals.
Kripalani says that Android fragmentation remains "a mess", but is nevertheless positive about the potential to sell book-apps on Android devices, particularly tablets like Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook.
"Android has been good for us: we're selling enough units to justify the effort, primarily in Amazon and Barnes & Noble's stores," says Kripalani. "That's not really a surprise, as both of those stores cater to people who are book buyers. We have a really good foundation to build on there."
That support will continue, as will Oceanhouse's ongoing development work on the omBooks engine to add new features. The company is also keen to break out of its book-apps pigeonhole again, taking some of the brands it works with into other kinds of apps.
It has already happened with Dr. Seuss. Oceanhouse released the Dr. Seuss Band music game for iOS in December 2011, and educational app There's No Place Like Space! in November 2011.
The former title raises the question of recent trends in the mobile games market. Dr. Seuss Band uses in-app purchases to unlock certain instruments and content, at a time when freemium games are riding high in the App Store and Android Market charts.
There are dangers with using IAP for apps that will appeal to children, though. "Some developers are becoming really predatory, which sounds very strong, but I know what I'm saying," says Kripalani.
"Some developers are taking advantage of the situation to turn children into click-mules. Do this, now do that, now spend some money. They're turning the child into a click-zombie trying to do whatever it takes to feed their virtual fish, or whatever. We're interested in exploring in-app purchasing, but we won't ever be predatory."
He comes back to Oceanhouse's educational ambitions, filing misguided use of freemium billing alongside unnecessary multimedia and interactivity on the company's Not-To-Do list.
"It's a question of how to decide what features go into your app. Will this feature enhance literacy? If it will, it's a feature we'll consider. If not, it probably ends on the cutting-room floor," he says.
"Other people might say 'does it make it more fun to play?', or 'does it get people sucked into giving us 99 cents?', but that's not the way we work."
