Interactive Reading Site MeeGenius Will Inspire Your Child’s Interest in Books

The kids have been on break from school for over a week now – you still having fun thinking of activities?

Maybe you live in where the snowstorms hit and you’ve been snow-bound for a couple of days? 

There is a great site that will help you give your kids something fun to do while inspiring a love of reading in them called MeeGenius, launched in April 2010 by Wandy Yeap Hoh and David Park.

MeeGenius is an interactive reading application that features many classic stories and some unique materials either for free or for a very low price – just a bit more than a song on iTunes but way less than buying a brand new hardback book.

Prices for most stories range from $1.99 to $6.99 and they can be downloaded to pretty much any mobile device such as an iPad or smartphone, or to GoogleTV, the Google Chrome Web Store or directly to your computer.

There are 6 free stories available for you to test drive and see what your children think. I can tell you I showed this site to my 2 ½ year old son and he wouldn’t let me leave the site – we kept reading the stories over and over!

The stories are in the format of a book – with pages turning and fun illustrations. The unique part is they are read by a soothing voice that highlights the words as they are read.

The books can also be personalized for a more interesting experience for your child.  For example, in the free book Aesop’s tale The Lion and the Mouse, you can name the lion and mouse and when it is read the names will appear.  It’s almost like your child is writing his or her own story! You can then save that book to your bookshelf and read it again later.

While many of the books are classics such as The Three Bears and The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the site also now features several exclusive titles from the famed children’s author Hans Wilhelm.

Also included on the site are new authors and original works which Hoh tells Family First really is the future of publishing books. Just the Diary of A Wimpy Kid books by Jeff Kinney started out in an electronic format before becoming printed books (and movies and merchandise, etc), Hoh hopes this will be the case for books posted on the MeeGenius site.

The new paradigm of publishing is going to be seeing how a book takes off before printing physical books, according to Hoh who lives in the heart of the publishing world in New York City. With the advent of the electronic reader, some stories may always live in the virtual world and never become physical books.

Hoh and Park hatched the idea for this concept because they wanted to give their kids a way to enjoy the technology of the portable devices like an iPhone while still giving them “good old-fashioned reading,” says Hoh.

With backgrounds in technology and finance, Hoh and Park make a great team for bringing this idea to market.  After spending 16 months doing research and developing the site before their launch, they now hope to become the premier site for downloading children’s stories.

All the stories synch to the devices so once you buy the story you have it on any device so you can read to your child while waiting at the doctor’s office, while sitting in a restaurant or anywhere you’re on the go.

They do allow authors to submit stories but they must include both the story and the illustrations. If the story is accepted by MeeGenius, they will then add the voice, highlighting and animation.

So today when you are trying to think of something fun to do with your kids, check out MeeGenius for a few minutes and see what the future of reading really is about.