Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5189655-20150205205704/@comment-5189655-20150212202405

Yes, I am listening, hence the reply. Using the word "official" as a synonym for "canon" is a very loose definition, and I think Wikipedia hits it right on the spot with their defintion of "canon";

"In fiction, canon is the material accepted as part of the story in an individual fictional universe. [...] When there are multiple "official" works or original media, the question of what is and what is not canonical can be unclear. This is resolved either by explicitly excluding certain media from the status of canon (as in the case of Star Trek), by assigning different levels of canonicity to different media (as in the case of Star Wars), by considering different but licensed media treatments official within their own continuities but not across them (as with Battlestar Galactica), or not resolved at all."

Walt Disney Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures are the owners of the franchise, but technically only the original creators of the franchise (e.g. Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, & company) are the ones who decide what's canon or not or part of the storyline/continuation of their work and the fictional world they created. And WDAS may be the ones who own the franchise, but the books are released by Disney, and not WDAS. And still, the release of a new (official) product based upon the franchise doesn't automatically make it canon. Perhaps canon in its own storyline/continuity, but not in necessarily in that of the original storyline/cont. But I am convinced that WDAS considers the books to be alternate continuations (which shares the same universe and the same characters from the original canon and takes their own route), whereas only their animated films are truly and originally canon.

Again, the books are as much canon to the original film as OUAT, and I've been under the impression that it should normally be implied that anytime an expansion or new adaptation of a brand is released it should be considered an alternate continuation. Unless it's a direct and clear follow-up to the original (like with Frozen Fever, which has no connections to either the books or OUAT, and so far it's really the only canon expansion on the film in existence).