Slashdot Mirror
Do Children's E-Books Ruin Reading?
An anonymous reader writes "A fierce argument has begun over whether children are actually 'reading' new e-books or simply 'watching' them. As publishers pump increasing levels of interactivity into e-books, the New York Times and others argue that these highly-interactive, popular titles are ruining the purpose of reading. The NYT also worries that new e-book titles could distract kids from the tougher task of actually concentrating on literature: '[W]hat will become of the readers we've been: quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted, in a world where interactive can be too tempting to ignore?' Others, like Gizmodo, defend these new e-books, pointing at titles like Alice for the iPad, of which they blabber, 'For the first time in my life, I'm blown away by an interactive book design.' But, the NYT counters, 'What I really love [about traditional books] is their inertness. No matter how I shake Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, mushrooms don't tumble out of the upper margin, unlike the Alice for the iPad.'"
Interactive books have been around for decades - books with sliding tabs, sound effects when you press little buttons - those kinds of things. So I don't think e-books along the lines of that Alice one are a problem at all
What we should be concerned about is interactivity replacing the text rather than augmenting it. That's when it's a problem
Why are there no textadventures/"choose your own adventure"-books for the kindle or any other ereader?
Also, these interactive kiddie books might lead to the kindle 3 being like this: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1910868
I can only speak for myself, but if you want to read a text, you read it? Any child should intuitively turn the illustrations off, or simply ignore them if they are distracting. Talking about the "pondering abstracted" reader or the "inertness" of books is just silly romanticism, text is text. And as a sidenote, I have ADD; I know the subject of distraction fairly well.
Emotions! In your brain!
I don't consider myself a parent with any real life experience, being that I have only been one for 3 months, but I have some observations on how my son interacts with certain physical items in his new world:
1. He is not permitted to watch TV.
2. We read books to him a lot.
3. He listens to a lot of music tailored towards children (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIueuNdB2oM)
While he has some attention for books, especially ones where my mother recorded herself reading them and we play it for him while he listens, he has an amazing attention span for my iPhone or the TV. He will go out of his way to crane his neck around to look at the TV if it happens to be on (we don't watch much TV) or physically move himself to look at the TV if he is in a device which allows for him to do that.
I'm guessing that either he's fucking weird (certainly possible considering his parents) or all children love to watch shit. While he gets excited when I come home from work, it's nothing like he gets when he's watching my parents on Google Video Chat. If he's going to feel excited via a particular medium then I say I'm all for it--especially if it helps one particular child learn better than others.
Same way picture books have been ruining reading these last couple of centuries.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Children + new technology = loss of childhood dreams
Don't we all know this from episode I?
Feed your head
I see it similar to the Etude music player on the iPhone. It's a MIDI player that highlights the notes on the sheet music and on a simulation of a piano keyboard as the music is being played.
The Cat in the Hat eBook has several modes, one of which highlights the text as a voice reads the words. Another of which lets the kid touch something in the drawing, says the word and highlights it in the text (if it's in the passage on that page).
Neither replaces an audio performance (like an iTunes song or an audio book), and neither of which replace the physical static medium (like a piece of sheet music or a book), but both make a nice interactive presentation to help the viewer's brain make the connection of these very different sensations.
Tools can be used badly. That's nothing new either. You can use a TV to watch amazing documentaries, or crappy reality TV and "talk" shows like Jerry Springer. Kids can use it to watch garbage, or educational programming.
Interactive books are no different. They can be inert. They can distract from reading, or they can aid the reading process. There are fundamental differences between paper books and ebooks but blaming the format for poor execution is just weak. Since they can be more complex it becomes harder to differentiate, but that's what you have to do as a consumer....and there's nothing like word of mouth in mothers groups and in the school yard to help in that area.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I got into programming and computers through video games.
Anyone who thinks that interactive books can't be a force for good needs to go read Neal Stephenson.
It'll be fine. Give the kids what they want.
When I was a kid I wanted comics, what I got instead, because it was "educational" was a weekly picture paper, glossy, with pictures with text underneath, instead of speach bubbles in the pictures. The text was in rhyme in some cases. I hate rhyming poetry to this day.
My guess is we're approaching Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", at least in terms of technology.
The Primer also reacts to its owners' environment and teaches them what they need to know to survive and grow
some more info on his ideas about "mediatrons" as he calls them: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=214
e-ink, e-paper, ipad, not only technology changes, but the way people are educated too. now that they will have interactive textbooks, studying is not only going to be faster, but even more fun. anything from physics, chemistry, biology is going to be not only described, but shown. encarta of size of your palm. fantastic.
indeed, I think some books will be better off left as they are now. the main reason behind this is imagination and fantasy of reader. if you are shown everything, then there is barely some space for you imagination to fire up. it might be fun to roll and twist your ipad, but it might be even funnier to have all those characters shaped up by your imagination instead of imagination of the artist who worked on it. but this applies to less extent than the former case with textbooks. i guess it's great technology to have in overall.
Next thing you know, they'll start making movies out of these books. Gasp!
Get a foreign language channel with cartoons. Or two. Or three. Languages, that is. Probably at least as many channels as well.
My cousin was speaking English almost as good as her native language (Bosnian/Serbian) by the time she was 5-6 years old from all the Cartoon Network she watched.
Basically, she was speaking a foreign language before she learned to read or write.
She is now studying to be a professor of English.
Also, when your kid starts to read, don't shun the comics in favor of books.
If possible, get him some comics in the foreign language he is picking up from the cartoons.
Amazon has international sites, holding books in the local language. But there are also online communities that scan comics. Even those in "foreign" languages.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I don't know why or how this trend started: to consider human beings (specially children) so delicate and fragile that every minor thing has the potential to ruin someone's mind forever. Traditional reading won't get outdated because it's a very efficient way to get high amounts of information in non-sequential order. So even if your children like to play with animated bleep-bloop books, they will eventually learn to read real books because they will need to. Necessity has been helping individuals and the entire species accomplish things since the dawn of time.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/10/26/
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Before humans invented written text, we learned by watching and listening. That's what we are programmed to do - watch and listen. Hell, how do we learn to speak? We listen to other people do it, and watch their lips move, and then mimic that as we listen to ourselves try to reproduce those sounds.
In many respects, interactive audio/visual methods are a more natural way for humans to learn than reading text.
Or do enough kids have iPads now to make this a real concern? (who the hell buys their still learning to read kid an iPad anyway?)
Based on my own experience, I'd say that audio books (and of course TV) are more of a problem. My daughter has been surrounded by books and read to for her entire 8 years yet she is falling behind in reading. (though she's ahead in comprehension or vocabulary/) She'd prefer to listen to a book than read it herself and we've, regrettably, made this too easy for her to do. Much like TV (which she doesn't watch much of at home.... only on weekends and never live TV with commercials), I now find myself in the position of having to limit her intake of audio books from the library in a bid to motivate her to actually read for herself. I would think that interactive books, as long as they don't read the entire text, are an improvement over the totally passive experience of listening/watching.
We read books to our daughter every night, and with a couple of cool videos (The Alphabet Factory and Word Factory) she's learning to read since she was 3 1/2. I wonder how inner-city kids with crappy schools and illiterate parents will ever learn to read. I've been thinking that e-books that can read to them and highlight words and such would be perfect for that case. It may not be ideal, but in an environment where there is little other way to learn, it might just be the best thing ever.
;-)
But that doesn't make it great for everyone
Call me old fashioned but one of the reasons I have always enjoyed reading traditional books is because the author only drops the hints at what the world in the book looks like but I actually paint the complete picture. This is the same reason why most movies based on books don't do well, because it is extremely difficult to compete with what we imagined that world to be in the detail and besides the imaginary world is individual to each reader. No two worlds probably look the same.
Unfortunately, the more we get into the interactive books which try to replace the written word with pictures (or even the ones which try to augment it), the more would we be limiting our imagination and seeing it from someone else's eyes, which almost certainly would result in less "different" people in the world. Most of us on slashdot are evolutionists and we do appreciate that it is this difference which results in our species evolving. Hell, it could be that Da Vinci etc. probably started looking at flying because they had heard or read fairy tales where humans flew, which then one day was realised by incremental advance in science. So in some ways, we would be limiting our potential by relying more on the visual medium rather than imagining the world.
What's under yellowstone?
Yes, folks, idiotic blather about how to raise a genius has come to the iPad. Ask people who have grown kids: they are who they are. There is astonishingly little you can do to change them. A rich environment beats a poor one, and you shouldn't starve or beat your children. Aside from that, just enjoy knowing them.
E-books are just a tool to engage those students who would otherwise not read. Start worrying when the kids aren't reading at all.
Well yes computerized weiner-dues aka byte-boyz DO prevent children from learning ... "Here punk" they shout "Waste yo time cuzin. Tappa typpa ... tappatappatappa ...". Lots of typing & gaming & viewing and mousing but, for the sprouts no reading no writing no maths ... An entire generation grows-up stuupid, socially stunted, imaginatively impaired & feckin-A fucked up thanks to byte-boyz. Keep up the culturally destructive work byte-boyz.
If you want a kid to read, you'll have to figure out the Dr.Suess first
Or just get the deluxe ebooks that are like popping "Shreck II" DVD on the nursery color TV. The nanny cam can read the smelly midget an ebook. After that, reading won't matter as much anymore. .
Thinkofthechildren! Technology improves illustrations --> Entire generation rendered illiterate! Soon they'll invent an entire GENRE of new media with moving pictures and sound and no need to read at all! And what will happen then!?
Esoteric reference.
The only problem would be a lack of fidelity, i.e. shitty gray screens, or a like of diversity, i.e. not having access to the whole bookstore or library.
Alice for iPad is a step in the right direction. Books for kids that age are mostly picture books.
And iPad itself can represent the full-fidelity of all of the paper books. And electronic books can also enable kids to get access to more books. Not just kids in rich countries.
We spend too much time talking about this shit and not enough time building. Kudos to Apple for creating the first useful electronic reader. The fact that they already outsold all the others is great news for publishing.
I personally learned to read by playing Zork on an old Commodore 64, now I am reading works by classic writers like Alexander Dumas, and Shakespeare and Issac Asimov and so many others. The point of reading is the usefulness of it, but you wont learn to do it unless there is something enjoyable about it. Why do we care if a kid learns to read by playing games or by reading classics as long as they learn. Eventually it becomes second nature and for so many of us it becomes something so very much more. I say all the power to the companies that come up with ways to get kids reading because lets face it, these days that is not a simple task with gui's and movies and tv and all these pictures and things.
It's always the same "This is slowly killing my child / making them stupid, I want it banned." or something along those lines... just stop your kids doing it. Especially, in this case, because it would be reliant on an enormously expensive piece of hardware in order to operate - they are not going to be sneaking into the bookshops on the way home and picking up an eBook reader illicitly to stop you knowing. If you have doubts about it, stop them doing it and do, I don't know, parent-y things like... erm... encouraging them to read books, praising them when they learn a new word, switching OFF the TV when they've had too much (and no, TV itself isn't bad - don't bring up children who when they hit adulthood are *DYING* to watch TV to see what all their friends are talking about - banning TV outright is just delaying their inevitable obsession with the "forbidden") and saying No to them.
My child is 18 months. She *does* get transfixed to the television when her favourite program is on. That's why she gets a few hours a week and that's that. Then we switch it off and she doesn't burst into tears because she's not addicted to it. If you have a long car journey, you take two or three books with you - she will spend the *entire* trip engrossed in them, looking at every page, pointing out all the objects that she knows, learning the words for the ones she doesn't and she won't feel "deprived" or "bored" just because she only has books. When she learns to read, though, a habit of deliberately *choosing* a book to take out on a trip with her (as she currently does) will make the transition all that much easier.
Reading, picture books, comics, TV, radio, interactive software, things scrawled in crayon on the back of scrap paper, they are all just media. If you use them correctly, and proportionally, they all have a role to play in a child's development. If you don't, and just let the kid have completely free choice, of course they will ALWAYS choose the thing that's least effort - TV or some book that "reads to them" so they don't have to do this complicated pattern-recognition thing that dad wants them to do. That's fine occasionally and, yes, occasionally you do have to let them just be kids and have a day off of making them all the "horrible" stuff like learning to read, or tidying their room and so those times they can do things like interactive books and software or just veg out in front of the TV (we all do it, in moderation for the majority of us, so we can't be martyrs here and claim to be perfect and always do everything that we would want our children to see us do).
Let them have a life, and stop bloody micro-managing their exposure to the world. So long as they are doing the stuff you want them to do elsewhere, let them have their time off. To a child, learning to read is hard work on an enormously difficult but boring task, so after they've had a few hours of doing that give them some time off with whatever they want to do that's not hurting anyone else - video games (the age for violent ones is up to the individual parents, but you will not *turn* them into mass-murderers once they have acquired a sense of right and wrong), building Lego castles, scribbling on bits of paper, making a frame for the TV with tinsel and glue (with your permission), stamping on ants in the garden, whatever, it doesn't really matter. That's their time off, the same way that even university students, or 80-hour-week workers have time off. Just make sure that if you're worried they aren't reading enough, that you give them that TOO, at some other time, and by *your* rules.
Consider how long children's books have been heavily illustrated. When I was little I won a "reading award" in my first grade classroom because I always had out this science book. Truth is I was just looking at the pictures and reading the captions. Nevertheless I obviously did learn to read, and I can assure you that seeing pictures as a child ruined my imagination in no way. Think of the vast amounts of data we are presented with every day. There are images, written words, music, speech, on advertisements, street signs, in movies, on television, in books, in classrooms, at home... If having one possibility illustrated (in a broader sense) before you actually stifled human creativity, there would be far fewer inventors, artists, and writers. And if you want proof you can search for "fanfic" and see thousands of young adults (perhaps older adults?) and children writing stories based on their favorite movies and television shows and books, simply because they want to apply their own creativity to the fiction. I found one story, obviously written by a young child, which sought to give a back-story for how pokemon evolved out of present-day animals.
In short, I think the least of your worries should be any new media constraining the imagination.
Esoteric reference.
My cousin has one of those Leapfrog Tag books. These are the ones in which you have a "pen" which can touch various objects on the pages and produce a sound. It's most often demonstrated as having the "pen" read the words that the child touches. However, the child can often touch animals, cars, trains etc etc and have the corresponding sounds. Out of two children, I have never seen them use the book the way that it is intended, they just touch the pictures repeatedly for the sounds. If I want them to read the book for the words, then you have to take away the pen and use the book as a traditional book.
Besides it's a waste of batteries. IMHO, it's just another way to "outsource parenting." People already outsource the babysitter to TV.
Also these books are damn expensive compared to used books, the ones libraries give away for a $.25 or ones from your friends whose kids have outgrown them.
Every adult (including parents and non-parents) seems to have lots of opinions on how best to raise children.
Here are mine:
1) Love them
a) Do not harm them
2) Protect them
Everything else is open to interpretation. If you are a parent, teacher, or someone else who has regular contact with children, follow those guidelines and the kids will will mostly be fine (you can't protect them from every danger, nor should you try) - and remember at some point they start making their own choices.
On the subject of interactive books: this was going to happen sooner or later. Still, there should come a time in a person's maturation when reading without aid of images is not only possible but enjoyable.
Translation: "It's new and different, and I'm frightened by it."
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The "readers we've been: quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted" have always been a small minority, but we think everybody should be like us. The ones who want to read will read. Those who don't will get distracted by the shiny. Just like our generation, the generation before us, the generation before that...
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Time to resurrect Living Books for the iPad. Little tykes would be enthralled by a touch version of Just Grandma and Me - and learn to read, too!
I think this book will do well with the young masses of the ADHD persuasion.
Was there the same outcry when pop-up books were introduced?
Having downloaded Alice for the iPad, it looks more like the app has revitalised Lewis Carroll's work, and made it fresh and interesting for a new audience -- It's certainly a more sensitive and respectful adaptation than the Tim Burton movie.
Obviously there needs to be a balance between text and images, but I can see parents reading this Alice app to their kids, with the physics-simulations being an attractive bonus to keep them entertained. Now that books have to compete with DVDs, TV and the internet, what's wrong with a little novelty here and there to coax kids into engaging with the written word?
Far from "ruining" reading, it looks more like Alice for the iPad is the first book app I've downloaded that actually makes sense on the iPad. Right, I'm off to play with the Caterpillar some more.
"My cousin was speaking English almost as good as her native language"
"My cousin was speaking English almost as WELL as her native language"
See the difference?
Aristotle thought books--reading--would be the end of civilization. All civilized folks (like himself) memorized long poems instead.
Same old same old. Just recently, folks said the web was going to be the end of reading and writing even tho the 'billions of web pages" were all written by people and read by others. They don't spend any time thinking, they just likie to complain, kind of like a Tea Partier drinking the Mad Hatter's koolaid.
If you've forgotten, UFO 54-40 had no linear solution. The book could not be solved by turning from one section to another. I don't know how this would translate to a digital format.
Kids books are fine. No kids can pick up LOTR and get anything from it. I used to read kids books all the time. Went from dr seuss to goosebumps.Soon as Shakespeare came along. I lost all interest in reading. Shakespeare is terrible; It's over analysed and attributed far too much to it. Shakespeare had all of 4 years of school or so. It couldnt possibly have been better schooling then our current 15year or so modern schooling. Either Shakespeare has none of the claimed things in it, or it wasnt written by Shakespeare. Regardless, Shakespeare is teribble. It wasnt until Catcher in the Rye in grade 12 that I actually liked reading again.
Years ago I took a course from Dr. Thorburg at MIT, the central thesis of which was that each medium has its limitations. You can criticize the artist, but you can't say that a painter is no good because his painting are not three dimensional. You can't say that television is no good just because it appears in a small window and programs are usually limited to an hour or so.
TV is not stage, sculpture is not painting, etc. In this case, interactive ebooks will be created within the limitations of the ebook format just as print books are created within their physical limitations.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If I want interactive "reading", I'll use the internet and post a inflammatory remark at slashdot.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
Repeat after me:
TV BAD
BOOK GOOD
COMPUTER BAD
EBOOK BAD
Anyone else notice a problem here? Judging an entire tool with a simplistic value judgment. A book involves learning to read necessarily, while an ebook, computer, or tv are more versatile tools. Sure you can watch trashy TV or play video games (at least a trashy novel is still helping hone reading skills), but you can also watch documentaries or shows that actually involve thinking. A good deal of the non-work time I'm on a computer is reading various news sites and Wikipedia to learn more about the world, just as I used to read an encyclopedia when I was younger.
I laugh even harder at parents who come up with some half baked notion of "screen time", lumping TV and computers in the same category because they both have screens. Unless you're trying to push the point that kids should be outdoors playing instead (which I won't dispute, and in which case you should include books as well), you just come across as an ignorant luddite.
So seriously. Instead of following the hysteria that your children might possibly not grow up exactly like your generation with all its good and bad traits, step back for a moment and look at the way society is going.
Also installing software that promises to parent your children for you is a great way to teach them hacking skills.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Accusing Gizmodo of 'blabbering'? Take that shit back to your blog, AC.
All good advice.
Cartoons and comics are designed for kids: simplify the unimportant, expose the cool ideas. They are going to be learning more from a Japanese or Spanish cartoon than from their father reading them a "good" book. My bi-lingual 5 year old still asks to watch Hikaru No Go at times.
Hell, my oldest kid taught herself to read in a few months from Calvin & Hobbes: once she wanted to know what the joke was, she went from "reading is hard" to "reading is easy" is about 5 hours.
It's all photons - get over it. Only the observer knows how what is being shown is being processed.
I saw the demo of the Alice book for iPad, and I think it's very annoying that things move/start to vibrate/fall off when you hold it in a slightly different angle. If I wanted to read it, I surely would turn off the interactive features. Of course it doesn't mean that all interactivity is necessarily bad.
As far as I know Marx never advocated a "Marxist" state and his contemporary Bakunin predicted many of the problems encountered later by the 20th century disasters.
Anyway I'm a lot more interested in Lennon.
Weird thing about Starship Troopers - in the movie the humans seem to be the bad guys. It's a distopian take on Heinlein's trains-running-on-time. Forever War by Haldeman was a response to the Heinlein.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I'm sure that when books where invented there was somebody that complained that they would ruin the amazing oral narrative tradition. That people wouldn't be able to remember any longer the tens of thousands of verses that anybody could at the time, and that inventive would disappear in a world of fossilized stories. And they were probably even right. So what? Things change, get used to it.
There is nothing particularly special in books, that will make people grow up really sound-minded. It's not like if today we are are looking at a generation of fine, upright, mentally flexible people with sound moral foundations. But wait, I'm assuming they ever read books at all!
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Okay, I just RTFA, and if you watch the video, the "interactive book" is no more than a picture book with very nice font, and if you slide you iPad around, then the pictures jiggle a little.
Is this a joke? thats what you call "interactive" ? I mean, if the book read itself to kids, and they're just clicking little buttons to play games or watch scenes, thats definitely interactive and it is definitely interfering with the reading.
But as far as I can tell, you still HAVE to read this. It won't read itself to you. It'll barely even distract you, its pretty much just an animated picture book. I don't see a problem with a kid reading a picture book, and I don't see a problem with a kid reading an animated picture book. He/she is still reading, albeit accompanied by some fun, but thats how kids learn to LIKE books at a young age. I had a ridiculously high reading level, I was reading Anne Mccaffrey books by the end of elementary school. But, I PROMISE you, I didn't start reading dense text, I started with some picture books that seemed like they were fun, and I learned to enjoy reading and be good and fast at it, and THEN I moved on to "adult books".
Give your kids a break. Jeeze.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
I picked up most of my English grammar from your mom.
Makes sense that yours is better. After all, you get to do it with her all the time, right?
I mean all the fucking, not the English grammar. That comes after the fucking.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I can vouch for this. I learned to read english from american video game magazines in the 90's.
I think it worked, except now when I speak I use too many words like "Cowabunga!" and "Rad!"
u watch anything u want to watch
just stupid idiotic argument presented
plsssssss
Honestly, do people even think anymore?
You can put what you want your kid to read in the ebook reader.
If your kid rather do the interactive ebooks? Then make it the reward for reading a more standard childrens ebook.
And honestly, take your kid to the library to pick up some real books. While ebook readers are a nice item, they are better for adults, imo, then young kids, at least.
Ya, maybe i'm getting old because i remember going to the library weekly to get books to read from when i was really young till a teenager, but I think that was a good experience. Need to support your local library anyways, it's a resource we don't want to lose. After all, I doubt they make ebooks that you can check out. wait, that's sort of a good idea.
Be seeing you...
Illustration is fine for something that is hard to describe, however, the effort should still be made...
Those aren't mushrooms, they're tiny animated pictures of mushrooms, drawn on a screen.
Also, if you hit the iPad on the arm of your chair while shaking it hard enough, it won't hold up as well as a cheap paperback...
Well, the children still read, even if it's the cheats website that gives them then answers to all the eBook's interactivity puzzles.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You're beyond old fashioned. There are many ways that kids can use their imaginations. It's not like books are the sole avenue for it. Kids use their imaginations when they play together.