When we describe FoxLeaf to someone new, the first response is usually a guess at what category it belongs to. Is it a film? An animated book? A comic? A summary with pictures? None of those, and the confusion is fair, because an illustrated audiobook is a format most people have not encountered. It is worth defining plainly before launch.
An illustrated audiobook is a complete, unabridged audiobook that also shows you what is happening while you listen. The narration is untouched: the author's full text, read at the narrator's pace, with nothing cut, condensed, or rewritten. What changes is that the screen is no longer blank. Scenes appear alongside the words and follow the story as it moves. That is the entire idea, and everything else in FoxLeaf exists to make that one thing work well.
The clearest way to explain it is by what it is not. It is not an adaptation. Nobody wrote a screenplay, chose what to leave out, or decided a scene was too expensive to show. It is not a summary or a shortcut, so it does not make the book faster to get through. It is not a comic or a graphic novel, which are their own art form with their own pacing and panels. And it is not a video, in the sense of something pre-produced that you sit back and watch. FoxLeaf is not competing with a film of the book. It is competing with staring at a lock screen while a voice talks.
The closest honest comparison is a picture book, grown up and running in real time. A picture book gives a child words and images together, and nobody worries that the pictures are doing the reader's imagining for them. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood we decided illustrations were something you graduate out of, and the result is that the entire adult reading experience is text only, forever, for everyone, regardless of whether that actually suits how a given person takes in a story.
For a lot of people it does not suit them at all. Audio arrives at a fixed pace through one narrow channel, and it leaves part of your attention unoccupied. That surplus goes looking for something to do and usually finds something unrelated to the book, which is how you end up four rewinds deep in the same paragraph. Illustration gives that attention something that belongs to the story rather than competing with it. Looking at the screen is not a break from listening. It is the same activity.
What makes this technically possible only recently, and difficult even now, is that the pictures have to be generated live from the words. A book has too many moments for anyone to draw in advance, which is why the format did not previously exist outside a handful of expensive productions. FoxLeaf generates scenes as the narrator speaks, keeps the characters looking like themselves for the entire book, and renders every picture on your device rather than on a server. That combination is the reason this is a new format rather than an old idea nobody bothered with. The engine that makes it work was designed and built by Tom Moore.
If you have ever finished a chapter and realized you retained none of it, this format was built for that experience. FoxLeaf is coming soon to iOS and Android.