David Drew - our third acquisition

We are happy to let you know that a blue sequel to our pink story of Lindy Lee called 'David Drew Likes Blue' by J.S.Kittinger and S.Hallett is live as of Friday. The history behind this book is slightly different from the other ones, usually we get a manuscript from an author and we either like it, or not. This time, we had a manuscript of Lindy Lee by Jo and it organically came out that we cannot have only stories about girls (and unfortunately the major part of kids stories are about little girls) and only for girls and that we have to have boyish stories on our menu too. As sexist as this might sound, try to say your six year old boy that you will be reading about a girl who loves pink before bedtime. We know our onions. 

So we asked Jo to write a similar poem either about blue or green colors. And we liked more the blue one with David Drew. We hired the same illustrator, Sonya from Great Britain, to make pictures so that it was clear from the first sight that these two books make a pair. I have to say that I am really happy with the result, they look cute next to each other, thanks to both artists. For more info about the writer and the illustrator you might want to visit their websites (respectively http://www.jokittinger.com/ and http://bonzaialsatian.deviantart.com/gallery/).

 

On a different topic, we started with three short stories which are now spent. Next time we are bringing longer stories where there are not only picture pages but also text pages - always one picture followed by a text page. Their names are - Andie Plays Pretend, Mike Rides his Bike to School, Falling Leaves and Foolish Brothers, Lizzie and the Phone Call. And we are tenaciously working on and on. There is a lot to expect :)

If you would like to have access to our children books line, go to our website www.okenkobooks.com  for subscription options. So far, we run on Android phones, but our service is coming to i-devices in few weeks, stay with us.

Sip'n'Cup coming to Okenko Books library

Tomorrow, we are releasing another book within our smart phones subscription line of children picture books, this time it's based on my comics idea that came to me when I saw one of the illustrator's standalone pictures. So we teamed up and created this short and abruptly ending strip about two guys Sip'n'Cup going on a vacation. In fact I don't know what are these guys, I was thinking potatoes, my friend guessed teeth, what do you think they are? I just think of  them as of Sip and Cup, my red and orange friends.

Our books are simple as books used to be - just pictures and text, you will not find any games and puzzles, nor moving pictures and interactive features. We believe that colorful illustrations and engaging story is enough to spark child's imagination and keep it occupied.

Hope you and your kids will enjoy Sip'n'Cup Go On Vacation by Jitka Adeleke, illustrations by Katka
Hustaty. If you haven't signed up yet for our story line, go to www.okenkobooks.com, it' easy and quick and perfect for a modern family.

okenkobooks.com gets a mobile look

Its been a whirlwind of activities this past couple of weeks that lead to the launch of Okenko Books. As you know we opted to go live with our basic site and reader for Android devices. Our iPhone reader is currently under development and will be submitted for certification soon.

We designed the Okenko Books site to be as clean as possible and have hopefully achieved in making it easy to use for all activities related to accounts and subscriptions. During development we constantly checked compatibility across different browsers. One of the decisions we had to make is how much effort to put into a mobile screen optimized version. We wanted our site to be usable at the very least from the devices we support with readers.

I must admit that with the current capability of browsers on iPhone and Android devices the bar was not set too high for us. Indeed we verified the functionality of the site on the default browsers shipped with iPhone 4.0 and Android 1.5 & 2.1.

The above notwithstanding we decided to push forward with a site optimized for the small screen. We now have a first version out. The mobile optimized site is limited to a couple of scenarios:

• browsing our catalog of stories
• displaying the faq
• a contact us page
• a how to join page

When browsing from your mobile phone the optimized version of the website is automatically presented to you. You can then browse select areas of the site or go to the full desktop site, which as I mentioned is fully usable.

If browsing the full version on your mobile phone you'll be presented with a link to return to the mobile optimized version.
The link is at the bottom of the page below the copyright text.
The screenshots to the right are from an iPhone 4.

Hope you enjoy browsing.