The rise of mobile media devices – smartphones and tablets – presents a fascinating, perplexing challenge. The digitization of media transports the book from the printed page to a screen — placing it adjacent to every and all other media. How well the book can get along with its new neighbors is an important question.
As part of the annual Global Market Forum presented last month at BookExpo America, the Polish creators of two projects that successfully merge literature and education with gaming, film, animation, interactivity and state-of-the-art technologies shared insights and lessons learned from their explorations of new world and the direction of publishing in the future.
Krzysztof Biedalak is one of the founders in 1991 of SuperMemo World, which started the global trend of applying spaced repetition in computer-aided learning. Since 1998, he has served as manager at thePWN Polish Scientific Publishers group, one of the biggest school, academic and scientific publishers in Europe. He became CEO at SuperMemo World in 2006, and from 2013-2015, he inspired, devised and co-managed the Olive Green project, a ground-breaking combination of an interactive feature film and an educational application for learning English. Olive Green employs games, decision making, speech-driven interactive dialogues, massive learning content and spaced repetition to provide top-quality edutainment.
Jakub Szamalek is an award-winning video game writer and novelist. He earned a Ph.D. in classical archaeology at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and is author of a series of crime novels set in ancient Greece. Since 2012, he has worked for CD PROJEKT RED, the Polish developer behind the Witcher franchise, a story-driven open world role-playing game based on the books by Andrzej Sapkowski. Szamalek co-wrote the story and dialogues for the “Witcher 3” — a critically acclaimed international bestseller.
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