Toronto-based Annick Press has unveiled 12 book trailers for interactive white boards that it hopes will combine effective marketing with a useful teaching resource.
White boards, which can project an image of a book so that an entire class can be involved at one time, have become increasingly popular in schools, said Annick director Rick Wilks. "It’s like having the book on an interactive computer screen. It can read, it can turn pages. If there’s a giraffe in the story, you can click on it and get information about giraffes, about Africa, about the savanna, whatever you want," he said.
Annick worked with teachers to make its trailers as enticing as possible to help kids move from the trailer into actually reading the book, Wilks said. The trailers are for books aimed at readers in grades 4-8. The prototype was built for David Jones’s novel Baboon, in which the young protagonist suddenly sees the world through the eyes of a baboon. "You take people into the story, you show what happens, then you can talk about baboons, you can talk about plot lines, you can show scenes from where the book takes place. It’s quite dramatic," Wilks commented. The book trailers can also be viewed on a computer and are available on Annick’s Web site.
Gathering and developing all of the additional material and visuals for trailers is expensive, but Wilks was able to get some support from the Ontario Media Development Corporation. "We couldn’t have done it otherwise," he said. "But it is the kind of thing that educators are looking for now. So it is very important that we do it." The school and library market is even more important to Annick since the demise of Borders, Wilks added.
"These book talks are a cornerstone of our plan to make schools and libraries more aware of the Annick brand," said Annick marketing manager Brigitte Waisberg, "to provide them with a teaching tool that cannot be found anywhere else at the moment, and to increase book sales."
