Chooseco teams up with Audible and Amazon Alexa to create the ultimate immersive reading experience
“Alexa, Open Choose Your Own Adventure from Audible.”
After over twelve years in the making, Chooseco, publisher of the world-famous Choose Your Own Adventure(R) interactive book series, is working with Audible and Amazon Alexa to create the first-ever immersive Audible experience featuring two titles from the Choose Your Own Adventure series.
The skill transports readers BEYOND THE PAGES to the underwater Lost City of Atlantis in Journey Under the Sea by R. A. Montgomery and to the snowy peaks of the Himalayas in search of the fabled yeti in The Abominable Snowman by R. A. Montgomery. All YOU have to do is say, “Alexa, open Choose Your Own Adventure.”
Developers from Chooseco and the Audible team had been scratching their heads for years trying to figure out how to make the interactivity of Choose Your Own Adventure books work in audio.
“It took a long time for the technology to get to where it is today,” recalls Melissa Bounty, Associate Publisher at Chooseco. “We knew that Choose was perfect for this space—how better to immerse YOU in the story? Swapping text on the page for narration, and sound effects for illustrations was simple, but we needed to figure out how to make the listening experience interactive.”
Chooseco supplied the best-in-class interactive stories, Audible brought their expert sound team, and Alexa delivered the seamless interactivity. The result? A truly interactive listening experience that immerses readers in a totally new and innovative way, while staying true to what everyone loves about the CYOA series.
Here is a picture of the first ever Choose Your Own Adventure book written by R. A. Montgomery under the pen name Robert Mountain—Journey Under the Sea.
“We learned a lot when we brought the series into e-book format,” says Chooseco CEO & Publisher Shannon Gilligan. “There are critical elements of CYOA in print form that keep reluctant readers engaged—illustrations, text from other storylines to encourage readers to explore more than one storyline in the book, the ability to ‘turn back a page’ after an unfortunate choice—and it was a challenge to replicate this experience with e-books. We faced a number of these same challenges when imagining the books in audio format, and it ultimately led us to working with Audible.”
Choose Your Own Adventure books have always been known for being an OG immersive platform. All of the books are written in the second person, so YOU are the hero of the story. Journey Under the Sea by R. A. Montgomery, one of the titles being released in this immersive Audible experience, was originally published in 1979 as the second title in the Choose Your Own Adventure series from Bantam. It was published a year or two earlier by Vermont Crossroads Press under “The Adventures of You” trademark. The title was then brought back into print by Chooseco in 2006. The book has millions of units sold, and has been translated into more than 17 languages.
The Choose Your Own Adventure skill releases today and will be available on all Alexa-enabled devices.
About Chooseco
Chooseco is a purpose-built publishing house which brought the groundbreaking Choose Your Own Adventure series back to print in 2006. Since the series relaunch, Chooseco has sold over 15 million copies as well as expanded its list to include linear fiction with the YA trilogy Weregirl.
An originator of interactive narratives, Choose Your Own Adventure has been translated into 40 languages and has 265 million books in print worldwide. Chooseco has expanded the brand’s presence through selective licensing. Twentieth Century Fox has optioned the film rights using emerging technology developed by Kino Industries to allow audience participation in a theatrical release. In 2018, a license of Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger to Z-Man Games saw unprecedented success in the first Choose Your Own Adventure board game.
Chooseco is based in North Central Vermont. It boasts a top-notch creative team dedicated to promoting literacy through immersive interactive stories based on the principles of series founder R. A. Montgomery.
About Audible
Audible, Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary (NASDAQ:AMZN), is the leading provider of premium digital spoken audio content, offering customers a new way to enhance and enrich their lives every day. Audible was created to unleash the emotive music in language and the habituating power and utility of verbal expression. Audible content includes more than 475,000 audio programs from leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers.