Living Books is a series of interactive storybooks for children, first produced by Brøderbund and then spun off into a jointly owned subsidiary, which were distributed on CD-ROM for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. The series began on 7 February 1992 with the release of Just Grandma and Me in 1992 until it ended in 1998; other titles in the series included Arthur's Teacher Trouble, Dr. Seuss, and Berenstain Bears titles. Three titles exclusively created by Living Books included Ruff's Bone, Harry and the Haunted House, and a retelling of The Tortoise and the Hare. Atlantan production companyRed Rubber Ball created a series of biblical-themes interactive storybooks under contract from Living Books in the late 1990s, and developed under the direction of members of the original Living Books team. By 2012, Wanderful, Inc. obtained the rights of the series and ported most of them to the iOS platforms and also added additional languages to the products. The digital licenses for Dr. Seuss, The Berenstain Bears, and Little Critter were obtained by Oceanhouse Media, who created their own iOS titles. The assets are currently licensed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. As of 2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is offering the Living Books brand as a licensing opportunity on its website.
Games in the series
Availability
released two compilations of the stories under the line "Three for Me Library™". The first volume contained "Sheila Rae, the Brave", "Just Grandma and Me", and "Little Monster at School", while the second volume contained "The Berenstain Bears Get in a Fight", "Tortoise and the Hare", and "Harry and the Haunted House". Several former Brøderbund leaders have released selected titles as fully interactive animated applications for Apple mobile devices, as well as for Android as Wanderful Interactive Storybooks.
Reception
Critical reception
Computer Gaming World in 1993 praised Just Grandma and Me and Arthur's Teacher Trouble, describing Living Books as "Broderbund's acclaimed series". Publishers Weekly, in a review of Dr. Seuss' ABC, called that title "one of the best children's CD-ROMs to date" and stated that, " the producers' fondness for Dr. Seuss and their fidelity to his sense of refined silliness spill into every sequence." Simson L. Garfinkel and Beth Rosenberg found that the CD-ROMs played better on Macs than on PCs. Although they found the titles to be of high quality in a market flooded with "questionable" releases for children, they stated that not all of them lived up to the company's educational claims and felt that the added dialogue supplementing the book's text was sometimes "out of character". Arthur's Teacher Trouble, The Tortoise and the Hare, Ruff's Bone, and Little Monster at School all received a very high score of over 90.00 in the book CD-ROMs Rated by Les Kranz; in the review for Little Monster at School, the graphics and the number of clickable areas were described as positives.
Commercial performance
By 1995, Mercer Mayer's "Just Grandma and Me" had sold over 400,000 copies since its debut.
