CSS3 animation and artful storytelling: Adding value to children’s ebooks

While publishers are trying to take advantage of the newest EPUB capabilities to make children’s ebooks more engaging, there is a flood of gimmicky, ill-conceived use of CSS3 animation. When animation hides under the guise of adding “value" to a book, but merely allows an illustration to wiggle or bounce without contextual meaning, it falls flat on the audience and wastes development money with little added return. Books that successfully uses CSS3 animation are a joint effort between editorial and development to merge textual, visual, and auditory experiences to increase a child’s understanding of the text. Just as ebooks shouldn’t be an afterthought to print books, CSS3 animation shouldn’t be an afterthought to storytelling.