Rebuilding a Children's Reading App to Reignite a Literacy Mission Rebuilding a Children's Reading App to Reignite a Literacy Mission

Founded in 1966 in Washington, D.C., Reading Is Fundamental has spent nearly 60 years working to solve the U.S. literacy crisis — serving over 100 million children and distributing more than 450 million books. In 2019, RIF acquired Skybrary, a children’s reading app originally created by LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow, as a way to extend their mission into the digital world.

The app had a strong foundation. What it needed was a clear vision and a modern build to match it.

By the time RIF came to Savas Labs, Skybrary’s consumer subscriber base had fallen from 850,000 to 250,000. Android support had been discontinued. Schools couldn’t log in through Clever SSO, one of the most widely used platforms in education. And years of technical debt made it difficult for RIF’s team to add new books or update the product without significant effort.

Beneath the technical challenges was a more fundamental question: who was Skybrary really for? Should it focus on families, schools, or both? Without a clear answer, it was hard to invest with confidence.

We began by conducting stakeholder interviews across RIF’s leadership team alongside surveys with existing and prospective users in both the consumer and education markets. A competitive analysis mapped the children’s reading app landscape, helping RIF see where Skybrary had the most opportunity to differentiate. The result was a Strategic Positioning Report that gave the organization a shared direction — and the confidence to move forward.

The existing e-reader was aging and limited. Adding new books was slow, accessibility was lacking, and the technology wasn’t built to support modern content formats. We built two comparative prototypes — one web-based, one hybrid in React Native — to help RIF evaluate their options before committing to a direction.

The result was a clear recommendation: a new e-reader built on the EPUB 3 standard using the Readium/R2D2BC framework, capable of supporting narration, highlighted text, and offline reading. Existing books would remain on the legacy reader, embedded seamlessly in the new app.

With a technical direction established, we moved into collaborative design workshops with RIF’s team to define the feature set and visual direction for the next evolution of Skybrary. The goal was a product that felt genuinely kid-friendly — engaging without being distracting, intuitive without being dumbed down, and accessible to every child regardless of ability or device.

Wireframes and design compositions were produced in Figma for key states of the application, adapted from the existing visual brand while making meaningful usability and aesthetic improvements across the board.

The final deliverable brings together four interoperable pieces of technology for the first time: a modernized hybrid application for iOS, Android, and web built in React Native; the new EPUB 3 e-reader; a PubCoder-powered book builder tool that lets RIF’s team create and upload new titles independently; and a rebuilt EDU dashboard for administrators, teachers, and librarians to manage rosters and curriculum through Clever SSO.

Subscription management is now handled through RevenueCat, giving RIF real-time visibility into the metrics that matter — subscriber growth, churn, and conversion — for the first time in the product’s history.

Skybrary came to Savas Labs as a product with a powerful mission and a platform struggling to support it. Through a strategy-first approach grounded in research, audits, and close collaboration with RIF’s team, we helped define a clear path forward and built the technology to get there. The result is a modern, unified, accessible reading platform — one that’s finally equipped to carry Reading Is Fundamental’s literacy mission into the next generation.