Jenny, Walter and I are incredibly proud to announce our latest creation – A Story Before Bed.

A few years ago, I tried videotaping my parents reading stories to my young kids. My parents live on the east coast and I wanted my west coast children to have bedtime stories from their grandparents, even when they were far away. The effort was cumbersome and the results were not great. For the last several months, we’ve been working on creating a website that makes this process dead simple and creates beautiful results.

Anyone with a webcam and a web browser can choose a book from our library of licensed and digitized high quality children’s books, record audio and video of themselves reading that book, and share it with a special child in their lives. We’ve worked closely with our three launch publishing partners – Immedium, Charlesbridge Publishing, and Bubblegum Books to create a launch library of over 50 books. Our growing library includes over a dozen classics such as The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Frog Princess, and The Itsy Bitsy Spider, as well as state-of-the art modern children’s books like the Octonauts series created by Meomi and the first several books in the Tales from the Chinese Zodiac series. We even have a small start at our Spanish children’s library with Insectos para el Almuerzo and ¡Qué Nervios! El Primer Dia de Escuela.

These visionary publishers recognized the potential for personalized digital versions of their content. This new marketplace will not only bring them additional revenue, but reinforce the existing market for physical copies of their books. No other genre of books lends itself to this type of digital personalization. We’re working with our existing publishing partners in addition to new high quality children’s book publishers to expand our library – rapidly.

With live 1-800 technical support (uncommon for websites these days), A Story Before Bed is for parents away on business, remote grandparents, split families, military parents stationed away from their children, and even parents just going out for the night. Ultimately, we believe that these recordings of parents and grandparents reading stories to children may become family heirlooms passed down from generation to generation – “let me show you my grandpa reading me a story when I was little.” Some early users have even used the site so children can show off their reading skills to grandma and grandpa.

Military parents can sign up for our special mailing list, which offers free and discounted recordings for men and women in the United States armed forces stationed away from their children. And everyone can follow us on Twitter for deals, sales, and new book announcements. We’re currently offering recordings at a special introductory price of $6.99 per recording.

We hope you enjoy A Story Before Bed. It’s the first of its kind and there’s nothing else like it on the web. We’d love to hear your feedback. We intend to make it even better over the coming months and years.