Rather than closing the proverbial book on the property when PBS pulled the plug, Burton and team got to work, briefly considering the possibility of simply moving the show to a different station - a plan they quickly decided would be out-of-step with its demographic in the early 21st century. "They say that when a door closes, another one opens," says Burton, "and what really got our attention was that there was a real reaction from people when Reading Rainbow went off the air. I was kind of surprised, but I thought immediately, there's something here. It's not over for the brand."

The answer to striking that balance between the beloved property and the changing tastes of youth culture arrived in a soon-to-be-released technology. "What would a new version of Reading Rainbow look like? Television was the medium that we used in the '80s and '90s, because that's where our nation's kids were hanging out, and this generation of digital natives, they get only a portion of their entertainment from television now. And then the iPad came out." It was a technology that, for Burton, was a long time coming. "I've been a science fiction fan all my life," he says with a smile "and it's amazing to recognize that there are so many devices that were imagined for Star Trek that are actually a part of our lives today, and the iPad is one of them. The chief engineer Geordi carried around a pad, not unlike an iPad."

Translating a television show into a multi-dimensional experience in and out is no small task.

And so, Steve Jobs' Star Trek-esque pad was chosen as the future home for the series. Once that decision was made, it was a journey that would take two years to realize. "Translating a television show into a multi-dimensional experience in and out is no small task," explains Burton, "and then with the added pressure of being able to figure out how to include elements that would make it really familiar to someone who had seen the show before, there were just a lot of problems that we had to solve for and that's before you get to the technology of actually making books and building a back end and a structure for all of this, the ones and zeroes." -158604%

Chief amongst the user interaction concerns was how exactly to drive the discovery of books, the concept behind Reading Rainbow in its original from. "There are a lot of people who are getting into the space of educational tech and books for kids, and for the most part, they're bookshelves," says Burton. "We wanted to do an experience. We wanted to take the discovery of books and make it an adventure for kids, like Reading Rainbow was. So we hit upon the island theme - there will be islands with different themes and a kid could go to an island based on how they felt about what was there." The initial group of islands - "My Friends and Family," "Animal Kingdom," "Genius Academy" (science and math) and "Action Adventures & Magic Tales" - are coupled with videos, old and new, maintaining the field trips of the original series in the form of shorts.