A father falls ‘in and out of love with e-books’
“Prior to having a child, I loved e-books. After she was born, I appreciated them even more because when I would cradle my newborn daughter in one arm, I loved that I could hold my Kindle in the other arm and flip a page with my thumb, one handed. It was convenient, it was handy. Now that my daughter is 20 months old and reading her own books, I’m equivocating.”
So begin Edward Nawotka’s account in Publishing Perspectives. He still believes in the potential of E but worries “that the advent of ebooks—even our looming dependency on them—is less likely to produce future generations of readers. Or at least the type of reader my daughter is turning out to be. My daughter’s love of brightly dressed animals who talk in a rhyming, omniscient voice is physical and visceral. It’s comforting and it’s very, very real—to her at least. The experience of reading is something she can feel, not just an abstract something-or-other that goes on in her head.”
Hey, Edward, is it possible that a color tablet—ideally one that was Kindle-simple—would enliven the book experience for your daughter, perhaps with help from the International Children’s Digital Library?
As an ex-child, I’d also suggests papering your daughter’s room with colorful pictures related to what she was reading. And, yes, as an ex-child, I suspect that paper books might still have a place.
Whatever gets kids to love books! Children first, experimentation second! That is exactly what I hate about premature talk of a Kindle in “every backpack”—when for some students a Kindle could be a disaster. I would also suggest a carefully phased-in TeleRead-style approach to give children access to zillions of books that matched their interests.
And speaking of kids: Our friend Bob Russell, over at MobileRead, may have a special interest in the above. Congrats to Bob on the recent birth of his son Sean Levi Russell, shown in the photo!
August 20th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Thanks for the kind mention David! And with newborns, or any situation with unexpected interruptions, don’t forget the importance of keeping your place in books. It is a whole lot easier to save your place quickly with an e-book. With paper, it can be a nightmare trying to find your place after the book closes!
August 20th, 2009 at 10:23 am
You’re welcome, Bob. Keep us posted on your son’s progress with books (or at least your reading to him). And, yes, I agree with your point above. Old-fashioned bookmarks don’t always stay in place, especially in the case of a child!
David
August 20th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Paper books won’t ever go away, but they will serve certain niches (like toddlers) and be collector’s pieces.
August 20th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
It sounds to me as though the answer is pdf here. Bright colorful pdf viewed through a program that allows annotations and drawing or ’scribbling’ on the e-page, combined with a Classmate Convertible or XO2 or tablet.
Kids could read, flip pages, draw, make notes, scribble all over … then erase all the scribbling and start over.
Well, there’s one thing they couldn’t do — they couldn’t chew on the corners of the pages. Kids love to put things in their mouths and chew on them. No doing that with etexts!
August 21st, 2009 at 9:48 am
One thing struck me here–the way children pick out which book they want to read (or rather, to have read to them). Think of a child heading to a shelf full of books, seeing them all, and choosing which one they want to hear as a bedtime story. How would they do that on a Kindle? Can we really expect a 3 year old to browse an index on an electronic device?