uTales: Everything's Interactive, Why Not Stories?

With digital books expanding beyond print, even outside the bulky desktop computers and laptops to the lighter e-book readers and the tablets, book lovers have more than one option to read books. I mean if everything is available on the go, why not books? uTales, a Swedish startup leverages the existing technology to create digital picture books for kids. The bigger advantage here is to make the book reading experience more interactive and thus interesting.

The startup germinates from the founders’ experience with bed time stories, the art of story telling that so many of us have enjoyed in our childhood and want to preserve the same for future generations. The idea is to engage, inspire and educate kids by bringing high quality picture books to the young ones globally. How exactly?

uTales relies on its community of illustrators and authors who believe and thrive to make book reading and story telling fascinating utilizing  every bit of creativity from the its community. To be honest, kids love anything that makes them imagine and visualize things (you don’t really expect a kid to read a text heavy, adjective riddled book, do you?). And also, pictures speak a thousand words, if adults believe that, kids would definitely love that more.

While the major focus is definitely on the digitizing of stories and transform the word of mouth into a more visual experience, uTales also has a bigger agenda. Every purchase that is made via uTales, a portion of the purchase is given to Pencils of Promise. The Pencils of Promise uses this donation to build schools in developing countries, putting to practice the phrase “education is every child’s right”.

Going through the site, it is interesting to see how the people behind uTales thrive for perfection. It isn’t just about creating books, putting them online for sales and thus revenue, quality is a pre-requisite and the editorial advisory panel taking care of all editorial tasks, you are sure to purchase or read books of high quality.

Coming to offers, users can have a full access to the library of uTales for $9.99 a month. However if you are broke, need to have full access at uTales, you can always spread the word, invite friends and help uTales grow. This shouldn’t be difficult given the social cause uTales has attached to it.

You can also Access via your iPad or the iPhone by downloading the uTales App. They have the Android version in the pipeline as well, meaning that we will have uTales available across all major mobile platforms. Before we wrap this up, lets have a quick read about the team behind uTales:

  • Founder, Nils von Heijne, partner Pronto Communication (digital communications agency, specialized in word-of-mouth)
  • Co-founder & CTO, Jens Neubeck, previously worked for Soundcloud
  • Co-founder, Jimmy Björnhård, founder of Leomira AB (web agency)
  • Co-founder Gabriel Sundqvist, founder of Pronto Communication (digital communications agency, specialized in word-of-mouth)
  • Co-founder, Anders Lindholm, freelance illustrator