...

Loud Crow Interactive – and the Digital Preservation Challenge

I remember when my very first iPad arrived, and I discovered *PopOut! The Tale of Peter Rabbit* by Loud Crow Interactive. A Canadian company, based in Vancouver, they were producing something fresh and magical: interactive storybook apps that combined illustration, sound, touch, and movement in ways that felt both nostalgic and cutting-edge. They followed with *The Night Before Christmas* and, later, a whole series of Sandra Boynton books and licensed titles like *A Charlie Brown Christmas*.

At the time, I was working at Library and Archives Canada in the Digital Office. Our team was wrestling with how to preserve digital cultural output: websites, sound recordings, born-digital books, theses and dissertations. I raised the idea of trying to capture *Peter Rabbit* as a test case. Why? First, because Loud Crow was Canadian, and their work was unusua. It would have been fascinating to see how, or even if, we could preserve one for the long term. The idea didn’t take off (there were too many priorities, too many technical hurdles) but I’ve never forgotten the impulse.

I recently tried to find the Christmas story and discovered that, sadly, Loud Crow Interactive is no longer active. Some of their apps survive in the iOs and other app stores, but *A Charlie Brown Christmas*, have vanished. The reason is licensing. Loud Crow created the apps, but the underlying rights to Peanuts were tightly controlled and time-limited. Once those deals expired, the apps had to be removed. Even if you purchased them, you can’t re-download them today. In contrast, titles based on public-domain texts have remained available longer This is where preservation collides with copyright,in licensing agreements. And meanwhile, libraries and archives face the question: how do you preserve an experience that isn’t just text or image, but code, interaction, and sound—bound to a specific device and ecosystem? Some argue that it dossn't matter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We can't save everything.

I still have Peter Rabbit and The Night Before Christmas on my own device, but *A Charlie Brown Christmas* is gone.Digital items are ephemeral andt this story shows how fragile our born-digital cultural record can be. Sometimes, it’s not just a question of file formats or bit rot, it’s licensing, platforms, and business models.

Loud Crow’s rise and fall is a reminder: what feels innovative and permanent today may be gone tomorrow. And unless we take deliberate steps—technical, legal, and institutional—to capture these cultural experiments, future generations may never know they existed.