A Story Before Bed™ lets parents, grandparents, and anyone with a special child in their lives record audio and video of themselves reading a children’s book into their webcam right in their web browser. Children can watch these recordings anytime they like. A Story Before Bed is perfect for remote grandparents, split families, parents away on business or in the military, or even just mom and dad heading out for an evening.
What people are saying about A Story Before Bed
“Slick.” — Jason Kottke, kottke.org
“It’s a personal, eco-friendly, and inexpensive gift idea for young children. And a clever way to love on kids who are far away, whether you’re an out-of-state relative or just a parent who can’t be at home one night.” — Heather, Evergreen Moms
“I’m totally gaga, though, over their new site, A Story Before Bed. This might be one of those things that parents and grandparents will flip out with happiness about while everyone else scratches their heads, but as a new parent, finding it made me feel like a special delivery had arrived expressly for my daughter.” — Marc Hedlund, O’Reilly Radar
“Great design.” — Jason Fried, 37 Signals
“What a great way to share stories with the little ones you love. What a great way to teach them to love story telling.” — Gregg Morris, What’s Your Story
“A Story Before Bed is a lovely new website aimed at anyone in a child’s life who wants to read them a bedtime story but can’t physically be there. The way it works is pretty simple… …This is a great idea, especially going into the holiday season.” — Richard, Fresh Arrival
“I’ve fallen in love with a new website and I must share… I love this site because I have grandchildren in Alaska and Massachusetts and I live in Texas. This is a wonderful way to do what I loved to do with my children, read to them at bedtime… Check out this website, you will not be disappointed.” — Glamma Grandma
“AStoryBeforeBed.com is an incredible find… …This is a very elegant idea, but one that could grow big.” — Tracy Swedlow, CEO, Interactive TV Today
“File [A Story Before Bed] under frikken awesome” — Paul Gregoire, @mondain on Twitter
“As a parent who travels a lot for work, [A Story Before Bed] is definitely something I am going to try out…” — Neelan Choksi, @neelan on Twitter
“How publishing will move to web-with beautiful ideas to share stories (not DRM/lawyers)” — Think Maya, @thinkmaya on Twitter
“#astorybeforebed. Further proof it isn’t about the ebook, it’s about what you can do with the ebook.” — Frank T. Lyman, @franktlyman on Twitter
A Story Before Bed™ was created by Jackson Fish Market. It is another in a series of handcrafted software experiences from Jackson Fish.
Authors, Illustrators, and Publishers
If you are an author, illustrator, or publisher and would like to license your children’s books for use on A Story Before Bed, please fet in touch at: publishers [at] astorybeforebed [dot] com. We have standard licensing and royalty terms ready for you to review.
Colophon
Many things went into the construction of A Story Before Bed. Here are a few:
- To make sure we had a nice starter collection of books beyond those we got from our excellent launch partners, Jenny led a heroic effort to produce all the “Jackson Fish Market” titles you see in the bookshelf. The Frog Princess, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and others were all produced by our crack team of authors and illustrators. Jenny led the whole effort. If Disney can create a great business based on public domain children’s fairy tales, then so can we.
- Washington state, county by county, internet sales tax anyone? Yes. Thank Walter for that. If only we’d shipped sooner, we could have shipped without this feature, but the law went into effect before we could get the product out the door. Put those tax dollars to good use Washington state!.
- In the bookstore storefront on the Jackson Fish website, the books in the window are the actual books we developed for the site.
- This product took us three times as long to develop as any other website we’ve built to date. Major!
- The grandpa reading the story in the demo recording is Hillel’s father — Berny Cooperman. Thanks Berny.