Children's Interactive Book in Iran A Review On Existing Situation And Production Challenges

Audience communication with digital media is mutual and interactive. Non-printed digital formats of books maintain the features of interactivity. This attempts to identify interactive children's books published in Iran and assess publisher’s viewpoint on   the challenges of creating interactive books.

This paper has applied a qualitative approach in three parts. The features of interactive books (published in Iran) were assessed based on a checklist and were described in three sections: producer, multimedia and interactive features. Interviews with interactive book producers were mined from periodicals and themes related to production challenges were identified. The experiences of interactive book producers were studied by phenomenological method to identify production challenges.

production of interactive books in Iran started in early 2010s and continued till the middle of the decade. Some publishers stopped production due to lack of skills or financial resources. Production of interactive books ran into problems because of frail   copyright laws, author's concern about co-creation, and a lack of expertise in the production of interactive narrative and multimedia content. Poor and imitative content fails to compete with similar non-Iranian products in the cultural products market. Lack of sufficient theoretical foundations for digital reading and technical infrastructure to support these products are other challenges identified in the production of interactive books.

Interactive book producers have not paid as much attention to their audience as they should. If producers do not have relevant information on their audience, they could not interactive narrative appropriate to their interests and needs. Under the circumstances, even if there are adequate infrastructure and appropriate financial resources, audience would not accept the product.