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Booksellers and content providers are focusing more attention on a specialty niche that is showing robust growth: digital books for children and teens. The splashiest effort to date has been the launch of Disney Digital Books, but there have been many others, most recently by Barnes & Noble.

As these initiatives stack up, marketers are revving their own online strategies to harness the demand.

Some of these digital-book initiatives are incremental add-ons to an already established online presence: Barnes & Noble's expansion last week of its website with a child-focused digital initiative falls in this category. The new site features an array of titles recommended for young people by bestselling author James Patterson's website called ReadKiddoRead.

The B&N enhancement contrasts with September's launch of Disney Digital Books, an extensive interactive site featuring more than 500 books at launch. On the Disney site, children can hear stories, read aloud, create their own stories via a module called Story-Builder, and learn the definition of unfamiliar words with a talking dictionary.

Young Adult Growth

Another example is the Amanda Project, one of the first endeavors by Fourth Story Media, a multimedia storytelling site at which readers can create online personae for themselves and add new perspectives to the weekly mini-puzzles supplementing the narrative in the print volumes.

Marketing to Digital Readers

These digital initiatives are being introduced as the YA (young adult) category is showing robust growth, fueled in large part by the success of the Harry Potter franchise.  This year, US book sales for adults are expected to remain flat - while young adult titles are expected to rise, according to Nielsen's BookScan.

Perfect Storm

Not surprisingly, these two trends - growth in the YA category fueled by digital initiatives - are attracting like-minded marketing. Every children's books publisher is exploring online marketing opportunities now, according to Publishers' Weekly.

"Online is the marketing engine, especially in children's," Joan DeMayo, Random House Children's Books senior VP and director of sales, told the publication. As an example, Rebecca Stead's newly published novel 'When You Reach Me' was marketed at an online event.

Children's book publishers are also increasingly incorporating social media into their marketing efforts. This summer Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing launched its Pulse It Web site, which - in a Facebook-like scenario - lets teens create profiles and make friends, as well as choose one of two books posted online each month to read for free.

Borders Ink is yet another example. It is a retail concept that started to roll out this fall by carving out space in the majority of its 513 superstores for graphic novels, fantasy and young-adult titles. Not yet completely ramped up, it already has a robust Facebook presence.