Four exceptionally tech-savvy kids are recruited by the government to guard against the mysterious archcriminal Shantorian. As with the first book, the story is told through a series of interrogations of the tracker Adam Henderson by an agent who is assigned to break him. Things aren’t always what they seem, though, as we learn that one tracker may be a mole. Readers are invited to crack codes, look for clues, and watch videos on their computers. (The same information is also found in an appendix.) It is almost impossible not to be caught up in this unconventional series and its many twists and touches of humor.

— Todd Morning

Watch the Trackers Trailer

The two books in the series, Trackers and Trackers: Shantorian, are framed as the transcript of an FBI interrogation conducted by special agent Gantz. As Adam recalls the events that led to his arrest, he periodically provides Gantz with codes to access multimedia files he prepared to support his story ranging from site rips of websites he encountered to video footage recorded using his team’s Tracker devices. Readers can enter these codes on the Trackers Interface or read the text transcripts Gantz entered as appendices to the FBI’s interview transcript, located at the back of the book. While this process may sound complicated, in practice reading Trackers is fairly straightforward: every time you see a code, either go online to watch the action unfold, or read the text transcript if you don’t have internet access.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss the series with Patrick Carman, who explained, “Kids will find a way to get to the material. Kids don’t have a problem with stopping and starting . . . that’s the way they’re wired.” This non-traditional reading experience appears to be resonating with young audiences. According to Carman, the online videos from Skeleton Creek, his previous multimedia book series, received over eight million views. Carman referenced receiving “…hundreds and hundreds of emails from educators, librarians . . . talking about how these kinds of formats are helping to bring readers that we had lost back to books.” Readers are becoming similarly entangled with the mini-games created for Trackers, competing to earn top scores. The scores have become so high, in fact, that the PC Studio team has been “trying to figure out over the past couple of months if there’s some way that [players are] hacking this thing so that they’re able to get these kind of scores, and we cannot figure out how that’s possible . . . the top three or four people are way beyond what we can do here at the studio.”

Read the rest here – www.wired.com

Buy The Book:

Become a TRACKER and play TRACKERS mini-games

Also check out new TRACKERS merch here

More TRACKERS posts coming soon!

Patrick

<-- Original Post Date: May 5, 2010 -->

Trackers Missions

Skeleton Creek has been nominated for not just one state book award, but two. Both the Delaware Diamonds Booklist and the Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards include Skeleton Creek this year. These statewide awards are chosen by readers, so if you happen to be in either Delaware or Pennsylvania and you want to vote for Skeleton Creek or just find out more, please visit the websites listed below.

www.doe.k12.de.us/dsra/deldiamonds.htm
www.psla.org/index.php/grants-a-awards/pa-young-readers-choice-awards/38-information-for-participation

Keep on rockin’ the summer – and head over to www.trackersbook.com, where I’m helping thousands of readers become Trackers! Ben

They call themselves Trackers, and they use their varied and incredible skills to find people who don’t want to be found. One might ask how a group of kids could do such a thing. As Adam so precisely puts it, “Because here’s the thing about the digital age: Everyone leaves a trail.” Adam is the leader, and he happens to be a technological genius. He fixes computer problems that even his dad, who owns a computer repair shop, can’t figure out. Adam’s room at the back of the store is filled with every digital component available to the public, along with his very own inventions. But he can’t do it alone; he needs Lewis, Emily and Finn for their talents and skills as well.

It all started out as a game, as their first case involved someone stealing skateboards at the local skate park. But as they practice and perfect, they stumble into something larger than any of them could have thought possible. During a practice mission, an equipment testing session, they discover a secret message slipped into the recorded video. With his curiosity peaked, Adam decodes the clues and messages. It turns out that someone dangerous has hacked into his system and stolen valuable information about his inventions, which is now being held hostage as the Trackers are blackmailed. Before they realize it, they have dug themselves into something so deep and dangerous that top government officials take them into custody for a highly classified interrogation.

Patrick Carman has created a new multimedia series that is unique and thrilling. As Adam is being grilled by a federal agent, he must reveal all that happened leading up to the big situation into which he and his friends have fallen. The interview is fast-paced and determined, leaving no room for unimportant details or boring descriptions, and it infuses many clues to hint at all of the adventure and excitement to come. Interspaced throughout the story are sections caught on video, and you can log on to www.trackersbook.com to take a look at the footage. If you don’t have a computer available at the time, printed transcripts of the videos are listed in appendices at the back of the book. As for the characters, most readers will be able to identify with one or more of the four friends. All of them are realistic and have their own sense of humor and quirks to enjoy.

The bestselling author of such series as The Land of Elyon and Atherton has delivered yet another clever, intense and technological adventure that is quite different from the average reading experience and follows up on the success of his interactive Skeleton Creek novels. Fans will be waiting impatiently for Book Two. And who can blame them?

Read the original article here – www.kidsreads.com

Urijah Sailes, 15, answered PC Studio’s online casting call for teenagers to star in an ambitious new fiction media convergence project which would consist of a print book that contains access codes to a website coinciding with the story, Patrick Carman’s Trackers.

“I was nervous at first even though I wasn’t in front of lots of people,” Sailes said. He and his sister Alexis filmed his audition video with a webcam and submitted it to the studio’s website.

Almost 600 prospective actors from all over the country auditioned online and at in-person casting calls in the Pacific Northwest. Four people were chosen to play the parts of the teenage trackers and were flown out to Walla Walla in July 2009 to begin filming.

Read the rest of the article – www.shelbycountyreporter.com

Statesman Journal: Can you tell us a little about the plot of your new books?

Patrick Carman: The first is “Thirteen Days to Midnight,” a superhero novel for the 12-and-up crowd. It’s dark, it’s got a love story and maybe most interesting for readers of the Statesman Journal, it’s set in Salem. My old high school makes a major appearance (Sacred Heart Academy), the Enchanted Forest has a sizzlin’ scene and the Oregon Coast gets its moment. If you’re looking for a wild ride through familiar territory, I think this might be your book. You might even find yourself on some of the pages.

The other release is called “Trackers,” which is appropriate for anyone age 9 to 99. I’m really aiming to meet the changing demands of young, distracted readers with “Trackers,” so the story is told through a collage of videos, text and websites … I’m using a lot of tech, but there’s a method to the wired madness — the destination with “Trackers” is always the book.

Read the rest of the article – www.statesmanjournal.com

PC: I’m just going to come right out and say it at the top: Transmedia, as a unifying term, is beyond lame. And it points to a challenge we’re facing in this space: coining a term is a tricky business. What the heck do we call what we’re doing? I tried vBooks (also lame), others have tried Diginovel, iStories, Vook, cross-platform – the list goes on, and I think they all fail to inspire at a level that will bring everyone under one tent. You guys did better with ARG – Alternate Reality Game – it stuck. How’d you do that?

To our credit (and by ‘our’ I mean everyone trying to explode books into the 21st century landscape) we’re talking about a brand new way of telling stories. We’re probably supposed to fumble around in the dark for awhile, but I think we’re getting closer. My two cents as of today is that we’re basically talking about something that’s been around for a long time, namely multimedia. And really, that’s a pretty good term to describe what’s happening to with these books; they’re becoming something broader, encompassing different medias. It’s interesting that movies and TV shows and web sites don’t have the same challenge. Creators of those mediums aren’t sitting around debating what they should call something when a movie has an ARG and spawns a TV show. It’s simply multimedia. The difference with a project like Skeleton Creek or TRACKERS is that I’m committed to a simple premise those other examples aren’t interested in: for me, the destination is always the book. That means the videos, the games, the web sites – they have a job to do, which is to get young readers turning pages. At PC Studio, where we make all these assets, a video is only as good as the pages it pushes a reader to turn.
Long winded already and I haven’t even exited question number one. The short answer is MULTIMEDIA. That’s what it’s called, that’s what it is.

Read the rest of the interview at – www.argn.com

Mobile Sites

These sites have been built specifically for the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad. But we have also tested Google Android phones too. We weren’t able to test the videos on every phone available, but many newer mobile phones and devices should play the videos just fine.

The mobile version of sarahfincher.com also received an update. We added support for the iPad and many other mobile devices.

iTunes

If you have a video iPod or you want to watch the videos without needing wi-fi, you can get the videos in the iTunes store as a podcast. Just search “Skeleton Creek” or “Trackers 1″ and start downloading videos!

Check out the gallery below for some more pictures of the mobile site.