The Making of Kitablet

When I look back at the making of Kitablet, I get reminded of the quote, “It takes a village to raise a kid”. Many organizations and individuals have come together to bring alive Kitablet. The idea originated from the Parag initiative of Tata Trusts that has worked for over a decade to promote reading among children. A desire to explore the role that technology can play to promote reading gave birth to the idea of a software product for school children to read and engage with good Indian children’s literature. Social Alpha empowered the idea by being its incubator. Initial conversations with schools and publishers helped us refine the idea. A team of children’s book enthusiasts in the space carefully selected the first set of 200 books with which Kitablet would go live. The passion for taking good books to children that characterizes many publishers in the space became a shared reason for publishers to come on-board the initiative. Our design partners did a brilliant job giving the idea a name and a logo, and the software product a cool design. Storytellers gave voice to add read-alouds to some of the books and a bunch of creative educators defined the animations and activities to accompany some of the books. Our technology partner worked hard to create the product and the eBooks.