14 DAY TRIAL // Electronic Arts has announced that it plans to release a series of titles called Flips, which will bring interactive children's books to the Nintendo DS platforms. The stories themselves will be provided by United Kingdom book publishers Egmont Press and Penguin. It's not clear how many titles Electronic Arts will put out and how many of them will be new ones.
Cally Poplak, who is the director of Egmont Press, stated that “Flips is a brilliant way of getting children into reading who may love their DS but may not normally pick up a book. We are proud to be at the heart of this innovation and thrilled to be a part of this first collection bringing authors such as Enid Blyton to the digital world, and encouraging more children to take up reading for pleasure rather than seeing it purely as part of their homework.”
Kevin Ramsdale, who is the vice president at Electronic Arts in the United Kingdom, thinks that the Flips series has the power to top into the top 20 of videogame sales during the Christmas shopping season.
EA is saying that each of Flips releases will be offering between six and eight books, with the interactive elements introduced every few pages and making use of the touchscreen on the Nintendo DS to engage the players and encourage them to get to the end of the book.
The series is based around the idea that children's books, which have less text formatted in more innovative ways and a lot of images, can be read on the screen of the DS easier than adult books, which have a lot of text and are more difficult to port to the device.
Flips is part of a recent strategy from Electronic Arts of creating more casual titles, like MySims Agents, which can sell well on the Nintendo Wii and the DS, the devices that have the biggest install base of the current gen consoles.