TOON Books is pleased to announce the release of the second of its comics for beginning readers iPhone application. Parents and children can enjoy award-winning books anywhere with the convenience of an iPhone or iPod touch.

Available for $2.99 at the iPhone App Store, the first iphone TOON Book immediately broke into the top 100. Parents can entertain and educate children with easy-to-read comics. Kids can immerse themselves with words and images while waiting at the grocery store, restaurant or airport.

Titles currently available are Jack and the Box by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman and Little Mouse Gets Ready, a Theodor Seuss Geisel Award Honor book, by Jeff Smith, author of Bone.

“Comics for the Jet Age! It’s exciting to see little mouse available on a new digital platform,” said Smith. Other TOON books will be offered soon.

Unique features of the TOON Books iPhone app include:
• Authors read their work. Children can hear the authors’ voices and see their drawings.
• Designed specifically for young readers to easily use, the pages can be turned automatically or manually.
• Onscreen text and highlighted speech balloons help readers make associations between the words they hear and see. It is the closest experience to being read a book that any app can deliver. As with all TOON Books, repeated use builds reading fluency.
• Narration is available in five languages – English, Spanish, French, Russian and Mandarin Chinese.

“The app takes full advantage of its electronic medium by introducing young readers to other languages,” says Art Spiegelman.

Visit TOON Books
Download Jack and the Box iPhone app
Download Little Mouse Gets Ready iPhone app

This is a collaboration between TOON Books and iStoryTime, a publisher of children’s storybooks for the iPhone. iStoryTime has the largest library of illustrated and narrated children’s books for the phone. iStoryTime books are available in the iPhone App Store in 80 countries.

Today marks the opening of The Strand’s Tote Bag Design Contest! TOON Books has partnered with the Strand (and so has the School of Visual Arts, Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics) to host this opportunity for emerging artists around the world. The contest ends March 31st and will be judged by:

-Francoise Mouly, Editorial Director of TOON Books and Art Editor of The New Yorker

-Art Spiegelman, TOON Books author and first contributor to the Strand’s Artist Tote Series

-Steven Heller, co-chair MFA Designer as Author Program, School of Visual Arts

-R. Sikoryak, creator of Masterpiece Comics

-Adrian Tomine, author of the bestselling book, Shortcomings.

Besides being a great resource for children’s literature, the Strand has been wonderfully supportive of TOON Books. Next month, they are hosting two TOON events: On April 8th, a Family Hour reading of Zig and Wikki in “Something Ate My Homework” with Nadja Spiegelman and Trade Loeffler AND on April 22nd, a presentation by Geoffrey Hayes, author of the Geisel Award-winning Benny and Penny in the Big No-No.