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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. .
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.
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
If I want interactive "reading", I'll use the internet and post a inflammatory remark at slashdot.
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