Submitted: The Two Sides Team September 19, 2012

If you’re like most parents, you prefer to read to your children with print books — ideally cuddling up under a warm quilt on a comfy couch with a fire crackling away in the hearth.

September 18 2012

by Jeremy Greenfield, via Forbes Tech

If you’re like most parents, you prefer to read to your children with
print books — ideally cuddling up under a warm quilt on a comfy couch
with a fire crackling away in the hearth.

A new study came out today from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop,
a New York-based non-profit dedicated to studying and promoting
children’s reading, about parents and children and e-reading. Here are
some of the findings:

Both parents and children prefer reading print books when reading together. One of the study’s architects, Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, told me that
he thinks this has a lot to do with parents having fond childhood
memories of being read to by their parents — in print, of course — and
want to build those same kinds of memories with their kids.

However, when traveling or busy with other activities, parents prefer e-books to print books.
The reasons for this are perhaps more obvious. When traveling, it’s
much easier to carry around an iPad than a stack of over-sized,
hardcover kids books. And when busy doing other things, it’s easy to
give a child who is struggling to read on their own an iPad that will
read to them (even in the parent’s own voice: see A Story Before Bed).

Parents find certain special features of children’s e-books distracting for their children.
Children’s e-book and app publishers embed games, videos and other
interactive features into children’s enhanced e-books and apps in an
attempt to make them more engaging and take advantage of the medium. The
irony here is that effort expended by publishers to make their books
more attractive may end up turning off parents — the buyer of the books.

All that said, the children themselves seem to prefer e-books when it comes to reading on their own.

In all of this, there is good news for publishers:

Nearly 40% of the parents surveyed have iPads and out of that 40%, nearly three-quarters read to their kids on them.

What do you think? Do you read to your kids with print books or e-books?

Read the whole story on the new study and see all the charts and graphs Joan Ganz Cooney put together on it. Interesting stuff.

Share this story