As much action took place behind closed doors as it did on the public stage in the Digital Café at this year’s Bologna Book Fair, with several multi-national media and tech companies, including Google and Netflix, taking meetings. Perhaps the most buzz was generated by the single, tantalizing Apple logo that hung above a perpetually closed conference room set up for the company inside a special lounge within the café, which served as a meeting spot for professionals from development companies, the film industry, animations studios, and other arenas.
One tangible result of Apple’s presence was the launch of a page in the App store featuring several BolognaRagazzi Digital Award-winning apps, as well as several that were shortlisted, including the Mammals app from the American app developer Tinybop, which won in the nonfiction category; Fox & Sheep Movie Creator from German company Fox & Sheep, which won in the new cinema category; and the iBUGS app from Carlton Books in the U.K., which won the BolognaRagazzi Digital Award in the augmented reality category.
Augmented reality was a focus of several presentations. Luca Prasso, an executive with Google’s Daydream Labs, spoke at both “Dust or Magic,” the annual conference for digital developers in Bologna that preceded the book fair by a day, as well as on stage in the Digital Café. Today, he describes his title as a “reverse ARchaeologist,” and explains his role as exploring the future, rather than the past. “AR has a lot of potential to change the way we interact with the world, as children interact with the world, but this will happen in small moments,” he said, at which point he displayed on screen how he was able to use his Google Pixel phone to project Storm Troopers from Star Wars onto the Piazza Maggiore, Bologna’s central square.
Prasso noted that last year’s release of Apple’s AR Kit and Google’s AR Core development tools have made producing AR content easier for many developers and should spur growth in the category. That said, when it comes to digital children’s publishing, apps remain the locus of attention, and the Kids App Collective brought together several of the hottest app developers, as it does in the Digital Café each year. This year’s featured developers were Ireland’s Touch Press, which is known for its apps The Planets and The Elements, but has more recently collaborated with illustrator Eric Carle to produce educational apps based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar; France’s Edoki Academy, which produces educational apps based on Montessori pedagogy; and Mussila, a music-learning app company from Iceland.
“The key with any educational app is to ensure that it is fun for the child to work with, and that means it has to be fun when they tap the screen one time or they tap it 100 times,” said Barry O’Neill, CEO of Touch Press. Mussila’s co-founder Margret Juliana echoed that sentiment. “Our aim is to make learning to read music as enjoyable as possible, for both the child and the parent. Learning takes practice and practice is repetitive, so it is important to make that process fun.”
Overall, "traffic was very strong at the Digital Café,” said Neal Hoskins, a consultant with the fair who oversees programming and runs the events, “with a lot of people remaining for talks and being fully engaged. We are confident that Bologna has a central role to play in the future of digital content development for children, especially for global players looking for the best companies, content, and people with which to work.”
This article has been updated to reflect new information.
