Bookry

One of my lecturers showed the class Bookry. This is a company that specialises in widgets for iBooks. The list of widgets they have created is impressive. There are games and things that are quite light and entertaining but the main draw for me were some of the more professional applications. In particular the embed widget for vimeo videos and the Google maps widget.

Source: http://www.bookry.com

These are essential to my project as they allow me to put the videos that say so much for each section into my iBook easily and with minimum weight. Instead of having to rip the file off YouTube or Vimeo and then load it into the iBook creating an enormous file, I can stream the video over the web. 

There are a lot of somewhat childish widgets on the site for example a word search and drawing applications. A lot of my classmates have included them in their books as they feel they add to the interactivity. Whilst that does fulfil one of the criteria the brief asks it also detracts from another. The product is supposed to be tailored to A level students. I don't think that A level scientists between 16 and 18 would want to be drawing flowers or doing a word search. For me the interactiveness that the games supply is vastly outweighed by the sheer inadequacy of them. The games are far too childish and slightly patronising I think. I would much rather steer clear of them and only use functional widgets.