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

Background and objective: Audience communication with digital media is bilateral and interactive. Book publishing in non-printed and digital formats has also created the feature of interactivity in books. This paper presents an attempt to identify the challenges of creating interactive childrenchr('39')s books in Iran by evaluating childrenchr('39')s interactive books published in Iran and the perceptions of this type of book. Method: This paper has been employed with 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 features, multimedia features and interactive features. Interviews with interactive book producers were extracted from periodicals and theme related to production challenges were identified. The experiences of interactive book producers was studied by phenomenological method to identify production challenges. Findings: production of interactive books in Iran began in early 2010S and continued until the middle of this decade. Some publishers stopped production due to lack of skills and others due to lack of financial resources. Production of interactive book ran into problems because of weakness in copyright laws, the authorchr('39')s concern about co-creation, and a lack of expertise in the field of production of interactive narrative and multimedia content. Poor and imitative content produce failed to compete with similar non-Iranian products in the cultural products market. Lack of sufficient theoretical foundations in the field of digital reading and technical infrastructure to support these products are other challenge identified in the production of interactive books. Conclusion: Audience studies is one of the issues that interactive book producers have paid less attention to. If audience studies is not continuous, the content producer cannot produce an interactive narrative appropriate to the audiencechr('39')s interests and needs. In this case, even if there are appropriate financial resources and infrastructure, the audience will not accept these books.