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The team behind this year’s World Book Day is abandoning the app to try and encourage teenagers back into bookshops.
February will be the last month that the team adds new book extracts to the app, said director Kirsten Grant.
“The app was a useful tool and enabled us to deliver content to teens in a more hi-tech way, but it doesn’t have a direct link with bookshops,” she told The Bookseller. “So teens could read the new short stories but could then only get £1 in their local bookshop as they couldn’t redeem their tokens online.”
She added: “As we really want to get them into bookshops, there was perhaps a bit of a disconnect in what we were asking them, as consumers, to do.”
This year WBD is strengthening its print book offering by providing two £1 YA titles; Rock War by Robert Muchamore (Hodder Children’s Books) and The Boy in the Smoke by Maureen Johnson (Hot Key Books).
The news that The Boy in the Smoke was a WBD title has already “got twitter buzzing”, said Grant.
However, she was keen to stress that WBD is not abandoning digital content for teens completely. A new YA page on the website is being built and will feature new titles and extracts each month, she said.