Crenshaw's Books & Decks

Horton Hears a who is a book about the importance of every living being on the planet, no matter how small it is. It is a book about the importance of the voice of any person to contribute to the good of the community. It is a book about the need to believe without seeing. It is a book about doing the right thing no matter what others think of us.

Living with a gadget is the reality of most Western Kids. Paper books are not so cool now, too bulky, too heavy, too environmentally unfriendly, too last century. Apps like this show how to keep a classic of the literature alive making it cool to the new generations of readers without losing the spirit of the original.

The application is a sort of animated mini-movie. You select the way you want to read the book, by yourself, or using the narrator's voice, or you just to leave it on auto-play. The app automatically uses the landscape setting and rotates the screen, and uses the original illustrations of the book, closing up and down to focus on the action and speeches of the characters. Background noises have been added, but they are very cute and not invasive at all. You can browse the pages on your own using your fingers and the pages flip as if they were ones in a real book.

The narrator's voice and interpretation is just fantastic, better than in the other books, and he plays all uses different voices and intonations for each character. I would have loved having the option of female and male voice narrator, though.