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Two YALSA programs at Annual Conference are geared to helping librarians think about and plan for how to connect with teens within the mobile and digital reading environments.

On Sunday, June 23, from 1:30 to 3:30, YALSA will sponsor the program Teens Reading Digitally Going Handheld and Mobile. The focus of the program is on how teens read, write, and learn using digital devices. Speakers include:

• Me, Linda Braun, who will provide an overview of the digital reading environment, what’s available for teens within that environment, and how teens are reading digitally and via mobile interfaces and devices.
• Supervisor of Library/Media Technology at Pinellas County (FL) Schools Bonnie Kelley, who will discuss how one visionary school district in Florida has created a buzz around the world by implementing the first one-to-one Kindle ebook reader initiative in K-12 public education, including digital textbooks, newspapers, and novels.
• Jacob Lewis, co-founder and CEO of Figment, who will discuss how technology enables communities of readers and writers to be participants in the life of a story. Lewis will frame his discussion around the Japanese cell phone novel phenomenon and has lots of information about digital and mobile reading habits and preferences of teens.
• iDrakula author Bekka Black, who will join the panel via Skype and is going to cover why she wrote iDrakula so it would look as if the reader were reading the story on stolen cell phones, how she got the idea for the novel, and how it ended up being available in a variety of formats and for a variety of platforms.

On Monday, June 24, from 10:30 to noon, YALSA is sponsoring the program titled, Trends in YA Services: Using Mobile Devices to Serve Teens. The focus of this program is on how libraries are meeting the needs of teens using mobile devices. The panel of speakers is made up of:

• Jennifer Velasquez, Coordinator of Teen Services for the San Antonio Public Library System, who will start the program with a portrait of how teens are using mobile devices.
• Students at the Patrick F. Taylor Science Academy, Enjoli Gilbert and Courtney Beamer, who will talk about how they use mobile devices as a part of their daily lives and will discuss ways in which librarians might use the devices in order to work with teens successfully.
• Kerrilyn Hurley, Young Adult Librarian at the Mastics-Moriches-Shirley (NY) Community Library, who will cover the ways in which she connects with teens no matter where they are by using mobile technologies.
• Renee McGrath, Manager of Youth Services at the Nassau Library System in Uniondale, NY, will discuss development of a mobile site for providing access to booklists for teens.
• The NYC Haunts project is the topic that Jack Martin, Assistant Director of Public Programs/Lifelong Learning for Children, Teens and Families at The New York Public Library, will cover. This program gives teens the chance to research important places in New York City and then use iPads and the Scavngr platform to take part in a mobile scavenger hunt.
  

Each program is going to be full of useful content and attendees

Name: iDrakula
Platform: iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch (requires iOS 4)
Cost: Free preview (first five days) and $1.99 to finish the story

I’m kind of obsessed with Dracula and I rather enjoy my iPhone, so when I heard that Bekka Black had written a modern retelling of Dracula that I could read on my phone, I had to have it.  Like Stoker’s original version, the story is told in correspondence, in this case, through texts, emails, voice mail, and browser history.  Check out these cute YouTube promotional bits.

Here’s the title page and contents:

There are two options for accessing the story, you can wait for updates, so you read a little bit at a time, or you can choose to read the whole thing at once.   I lasted about 1/3 of the way through getting daily updates, before I had to click “read the full story now.”  I think the daily updates would be appealing to teens because you get a reminder message that there is new content to read in iDrakula on your phone, and then you can go read it.  For busy teens, a daily piece of story that shows up on your phone and asks you to read it is a great way to keep reading  without feeling like you have to sit down and devote a large chunk of time to it.  If you get hooked and need to know what happens next, you have the option to do so at the touch of a button.

The interface is quite simple.  For each day in the story there is a list of messages.  You can click on each message, use arrow keys to go to the next one, or simply slide your finger to turn the page.  The design is an amusing gothic version of the regular iPhone interface- each screen has a blood red background with details that make it look like you’re reading through smashed glass.  It sets the mood quite nicely. The app runs great over 3G for a perfect read-anywhere experience.

iDrakula is also available in print, and as an ebook, but I am skeptical of how it would translate to these media.  It tangibly loses something in print because you can’t play the voicemail messages, but I think it would lose even more because it is a story that exists in the realm of cell phone communications.  When you read it on your phone, it’s like you’re evesdropping on the action as it occurs.

The story both simplifies and deviates from the source material, as it obviously must to translate a 300 page novel into an eighteen day set of cell phone communications.  The author readily admits that some of the things she changed because she “thought they were cool”.  As a Dracula purist, there were some changes that I did not like.  (Mina and Jonathan’s relationship is rock-solid in the original, but this is not the first