Emergency Librarian wrote the series upheld the high standards of Broderbund. TES thought the series owned the interactive storybook genre. In 1996, The Educational Technology Handbook wrote that Living Books was "running away with awards". Inside Education thought the series was "setting a standard for excellence in the children's software industry". By 1997 there were at least eight manufacturers of CD-ROM interactive storybooks. Salon described Living Books as "one of the hot companies of the early-'90s electronic publishing boom". The Seattle Times asserted that Living Books "popularized the animated storybook format". Strategy+Business deemed the series part of Broderbund's "string of winners" including Print Shop, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, Kid Pix and Myst. In 1999, Interaktive Geschichten für Kinder und Jugendliche auf CD-ROM noted Broderbund was "one of the first companies to convert books into multimedia form". Schlichting's child-informed design is a technique which by 1999 would become ubiquitous in both the industry and academia almost a decade after its use by Living Books. Living Books were the first to use both "read to me" and "let me play" modes, as well as speech-driven highlighting; both techniques have since been widely adapted in children's language app design. Children's Tech Review featured an interview with Schlichting in their March/April 1999 issue entitled A Conversation with Mark Schlichting: The Guy Who Thought Up the Living Books; in it the newspaper opined, "if someone asked you to name the best children's software ever made, Living Books would surely make the list". Massenmedium Computer reflected in 1999 that the 'virtual pop-ups' received "surprisingly good" reviews despite Living Books' short history and the series' "artistically unappealing design".
