E-Books or Paper Books: Which Is Best For Kids? by Kristina Chew

Photo: Kristina Chew

Kristina Chew writes, "Paper or plastic?
The familiar grocery store check-out lane question could as easily apply to buying books these days. Will it be the paper volume or the hi-tech iPad/Kindle/Nook/e-book reader?"

Photo: Care2.com

While more and more adults (myself included) have been foregoing print books for e-ones, people still prefer to have their children read real, actual, paper-paged books. For children under the age of 8, sales of e-book titles have stayed at less than 5 percent of annual sales. In contrast, e-books account for more than 25 percent of sales in some categories of books for adults.

Brightly-hued picture e-books equipped with sounds and music and animations can be downloaded onto iPads and their ilk, but these also hold distractions like games and apps for doodling, drawing with stars, making music and more. Indeed, Junko Yokota, a professor and director of the Center for Teaching Through Children’s Books at National Louis University in Chicago, thinks that something gets lost in the “translation” of a picture book to a digital format:

…the shape and size of the book are often part of the reading experience. Wider pages might be used to convey broad landscapes, or a taller format might be chosen for stories about skyscrapers.

Size and shape “become part of the emotional experience, the intellectual experience. There’s a lot you can’t standardize and stick into an electronic format,” said Ms. Yokota, who has lectured on how to decide when a child’s book is best suited for digital or print format.

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Related links
Amazon Launches Digital “Lending Library”
Can a Bookstore Not Have Books?
The End of the Story: Borders To Close

Source: Care2.com