Disney launches digital books for children

The Walt Disney Company hopes an ambitious new digital service it plans to unveil on Tuesday will transform how children read its storybooks.

Disney Publishing plans to introduce a new subscription-based Web site. For $79.95 a year, families can access electronic replicas of hundreds of Disney books, from “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too” to “Hannah Montana: Crush-tastic!”

DisneyDigitalBooks.com, which is aimed at children ages 3 to 12, is organized by reading level. In the “look and listen” section for beginning readers, the books will be read aloud by voice actors to accompanying music (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.

“For parents, this isn’t going to replace snuggle time with a storybook,” said Yves Saada, vice president of digital media. “We think you can have different reading formats co-existing together.”

Publishers have been experimenting with e-books for the children’s 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 nonfiction e-book on a related topic. “Curious George” is available on the iPhone.

E-book observers are impressed. “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 Web site. “They are the first to say, we’re putting our whole catalog online in this one place, and we’re selling it straight to parents.”

By pursuing a subscription online model — as opposed to focusing on downloads and sales for devices like the Kindle — Disney is placing a specific bet about where the children’s 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 annually sells 250 million children’s books.

“The company feels that devices don’t offer a Disney-level experience for kids and families, and I agree with them,” Ms. Epps said.

Disney Publishing has digital aspirations for cellphones and devices down the road, Mr. Saada said, but for now will focus on the site, which it has designed with safety concerns in mind. Controls are built in, for instance, that make it difficult for children to drift to a seedier section of the Web.

“We want to make reading an even bigger deal in a kid’s life, and if we can do that in a new and interactive way — great,” said Russell Hampton, president of Disney Publishing. He continued that  the Disney Digital Books site was designed so other businesses — language learning, for instance — could be added. Disney sees education services as a fruitful area of growth, particularly overseas.

A huge marketing effort will set about drilling the site into the public consciousness. Three million promotional postcards will be distributed at screenings of Disney films, and a social media and advertising component is intended to reach 14 million mothers. In the works are demonstrations at Apple’s retail stores.

Until now, Disney Publishing has only dabbled in the digital arena, offering some young adult titles for the Kindle and licensing a handful of storybook titles to LeapFrog, the educational toy maker. About 500 books will be available on the site Tuesday, with more added twice a month. (Disney owns thousands of titles.) Exclusive content will follow by the end of the year. Disney Digital Books will begin introducing titles in foreign countries in 2011.

The company tested a version of the site with 1,000 children and families earlier this year. Children spent an average of three hours using the product over five days, according to Mr. Saada. After completing the trial, 76 percent of parents said they would subscribe.