Moving Books is an Android app for kids that aims to let little ones have fun and let their hair down with colorful animated versions of classic songs and classic books. Moving Books is a free app that comes from Japanese firm FORii and classic books and songs include “Three Little Pigs”, “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood”. Moving Books is a way for kids to singalong and experience traditional stories and folktales from all over the world, available in both English and Japanese, this is a fun and colorful app that has countless classic stories and songs on offer. There are more titles always coming and the app is completely free to download and use.
For those looking for a more colorful and traditional way of entertaining their kids, they can download Moving Books from the Play Store here. When the app is launched, you’ll see two sections, one for songs:
As well as another section for books:
Each section will start off as being blank, this is because you need to touch on the squares and a song or book will download automatically. There’s no extra steps to this though, you just need to touch a square, and a progress bar will appear, which means that kids can download their own titles with Moving Books.
I started off with a slightly off-beat book choice with Omisuri Kororin which is ‘The Rolling Rice Ball’ in English.
The graphical style of these books is really nice and colorful, and they do feel like a book, rather than a short movie, but they do seem to move a little quickly for me, so younger kids might have trouble reading along, but you can always touch and access controls with a pause button.
Then there are the songs, which feature the same sort of art style and flow to them, but they have a definite song structure to them and each line is sung aloud with some simple backing music, all easy enough for younger users to keep up with and understand.
These songs also feature a little dance in them as well, which is particularly nice to see for girls, as even though they might not be able to follow the moves, all little girls enjoy a good dance.
There’s a wide variety of these different songs and books, and they all seem to be free to download, which is a little strange to say the least but it’s nice to see. There is a parent’s area here as well, which asks for a simple code (which is a new code each time) in order to show itself:
It would appear that the majority of parental features here seem to be based around choosing which stories are shown and such:
After having spent a little time with Moving Books for Android, I can certainly ee why parents and kids alike will love something like this. Not only is it free, it has all sorts of different books and songs that kids can read along or sing along with. My only complaint with the books is that I wish they went a little slower so that younger kids could read along with the book in real time, as I thought it was a little too quick. I’m also not sure exactly why all of these books and songs are free to download and watch or listen to, it doesn’t seem like a song business model, but I could of course be missing something. Needless to say, this is a great little app for young kids and I’ll definitely agree that this sort of entertainment is better for kids than mindless games or something similar.
Ratings
- Speed (4/5) – Everything here runs nice and quickly and depending on your connection speed, downloading books and songs takes no time at all.
- Features (5/5) – For quick, simple and wholesome entertainment for your little ones, Moving Books is excellent and cannot be beaten.
- Theme (4/5) – I like the look of the graphics here, the songs and books all sound great as well, but they do run a little quickly I feel.
- Overall (4.5/5) – If you’re looking for something to keep kids entertained, but only want to make sure they’re looking at wholesome content, then this is a great choice, and it has even more options coming soon.
Pros
- Offers up a whole range of free books and songs without the need to download a new app each and every time.
- Has a parent’s area for changing key settings and choosing which stories display, offering parents a way to police things a little bit.
- With lots of quality, traditional tales on offer, as well as some more exotic folktales from Japan as well, this has a nice mix of the traditional and the new.
- Great graphics that kids will really enjoy, as well as some excellent songs that sound great, the whole setup is well-presented here.
Cons
Very few options for parents to change here, for some reason.- Could be considered too good to be true considering all of the books and songs seem to be free for some reason.
All-in-all, there’s a lot on offer here and for parents that want to keep their little ones entertained without sending them off to the dodgy realm of YouTube or just leaving them to play a game, this is the sort of thing that a lot of parents will enjoy. I do wish the books ran slower, or had more options to them, but everything looks good and sounds good here, and there’s little else to complain about. A solid option for parents, this is well worth checking out.