Fable maker to target youth e-book market

Isabella Products has teamed up with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to display titles in color. (Isabella Products)

by: Hiawatha Bray

Amazon.com is making a fortune selling electronic books, presumably to adults. Now, Concord start-up company Isabella Products Inc. and Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are planning to cash in on an untapped market: e-books for children.


Next summer, Isabella will introduce the Fable, a combination tablet computer and e-book reader aimed at children. Unlike the black-and-white screen found on Amazon.com’s popular Kindle e-reader, the Fable will feature a full-color, 7-inch touchscreen that can display the colorful illustrations found in most children’s titles.


“Today there’s very, very little children’s digital illustrated content, “said Isabella chief executive Matthew Growney. “There’s now a way to bring this content into your child’s backpack.’’

Cheryl Cramer Toto, Houghton Mifflin’s senior vice president of digital strategy and planning, said an inexpensive color e-reader would open up a vast new audience of younger readers. “There is a real market need out there for a kids’ color tablet,’’ Toto said.

The Fable will run a customized version of Google Inc.’s Android operating system, the same software found on many cellphones. And like the Kindle, it will connect wirelessly to the Internet through a cellular data network. Each Fable will come preloaded with several titles from Houghton Mifflin’s large library of children’s books, but parents can use the network to download new books to the device. Titles are expected to cost between 99 cents and $3.99.

Growney said Houghton Mifflin isn’t the only children’s book publisher with an interest in producing books for the Fable. “We have right now four other publishers signed up,’’ he said, but he declined to identify them.

The Fable will be more than an e-reader. Like Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet, it will be able to run software apps such as educational games. It will include a drawing program to let users make digital sketches, and a four-megapixel digital camera. Users can share drawings and photos via e-mail. But the Fable tablet’s privacy software lets children communicate only with people who have been approved by their parents. “There’s a lot on the Internet that you don’t want kids accessing,’’ said Toto.

Growney hopes to price the Fable between $149 and $179, with an additional fee for the cellular data service. Isabella already makes Vizit, a digital picture frame that gets new photos through a cellular connection. The Vizit data service costs $5 a month or $79 a year, and Growney said he’s considering the same price for the Fable data service.

Americans bought $3.2 billion of children’s and young adult hardcover and paperback books last year, according to the Association of American Publishers. Nobody has tracked the number of children’s e-book sales, but Allen Weiner, e-book market analyst at Gartner Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz., said the number is small, because early black-and-white devices aren’t suitable for many such books.

But a wave of new color readers is making an impact. Weiner cited Apple’s iPad and the new color version of the Nook e-reader from bookseller Barnes & Noble. “The opportunity for kid’s books has suddenly erupted,’’ Weiner said.

from: Boston Globe