Today is an incredibly exciting day. Today is the launch of the Puffin Digital Prize and a brave new world for Puffin picture books. I'm so excited I can hardly breathe. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take a deep breath and I’ll explain things properly. I'll start at the very beginning . . .
As the Editorial Director of Puffin Picture Books, I am the lucky girl who has the privilege of working on beautifully illustrated, full colour books for young readers. Think Raymond Briggs and The Snowman, add Helen Oxenbury and Julia Donaldson and you get the picture. As I said, I am VERY lucky. But I wasn't feeling quite so lucky a little while ago, when the word digital was a real thorn in my side. How did picture books fit into this amazing digital world everyone was talking about? Well, quite simply, they didn't. Being full colour with integrated text, the technology simply didn't exist to bring them to life on a digital device. I would enviously look at my fiction colleagues with their e-readers where a whole world of stories lived and breathed in one nifty little machine. Sigh. All I could do was be patient. One day, I said to my beautiful, fully illustrated books, one day, your time will come.
And come it did with a bang - the iPad. Woo-hoo! Like every other person at Penguin, I used all sorts of ruses, good and bad, to get my hands on one. And when I did it felt like Christmas. I've always been a
book-sniffer (I use that term affectionately, someone who loves a book for being a book as well as a fabulous story) but my conversion was complete in that one moment. Just look at what this thing can do! We have glorious technicolour in fanta