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Bookboard Streams Kids' Books to the iPad; But Are E-books Good For Your Children?

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Child with Apple iPad (Photo credit: IntelFreePress)

Bookboard is a new digital subscription service that streams children’s books to the iPad.

My boys and I have been testing it for about a month. Bookboard provides us with a steady supply of new storybooks at bedtime. It employs gamification elements to keep my seven year old son motivated to keep reading on his own. And it has caused me to reflect on the experience of reading to my kids on a tablet.

I’ve often wondered how my kids think about books. Both the digital book and the print book have always been a normal part of their bedtime routine. Those familiar arguments from e-book critics about the visceral experience of paper--the coarseness of wood pulp against one’s fingertips, the scent of library stacks--would seem utterly nonsensical to them. It is not a choice between print or e-books. My boys have always had both.

We read bedtime stories on the nook simple touch as often as we read from paper.  We paged through the Percy Jackson series on a first generation Kindle. And now, using the Bookboard app, we devour both picture books and chapter books on the iPad Mini.

Bookboard is more a Netflix-like service than it is an iOS app. After signing up at Bookboard.com, you download the app to your iPad. The first few books are free. After you’ve read a few all the way through, you unlock more. In order to keep unlocking books, you’ll have to subscribe to the service ($8.99 per month, or $29.94 for 6 months).

Bookboard emphasizes the importance of co-reading and storytime, the interactive experience of parents and children choosing books together, and the simplicity of finding and unlocking new books together.

The first thing you do is set up profiles for your kids, providing their genders, ages and reading skill levels. Bookboard then offers a sampling of books and you start reading. Pretty simple.

The core of the Bookboard service is the selection of books, which is personalized for individual readers. I asked Nigel Pegg, co-founder and technical lead at Bookboard, to explain how the service makes book recommendations. Here’s what he wrote:

There are 2 "phases" to the way books are introduced to kids in Bookboard.

1) First is the "sampler", where we provide a set of 25 books with somewhat exaggerated variance; for example, a mix of picture, beginning reader, and chapter-books. We do use profile info you input, primarily birth-date, to scope that set of books, but again, we play a little looser at the start.

2) Second is unlocking new books. Based on kids' choices, the service starts to hone in on potential interests, and books at a similar reading comprehension level. Cen (Bookboard’s “Librarian”) has developed standards across our library for indicating both thematic/interest metadata as well as reading level - in essence, she's very much cataloging books as one would at a physical library. We use that curation information to make choices about what to unlock next. Cen's input goes all the way into the design of the system, pointing out dimensions and strategies for matching that we'd overlooked.

We're constantly evolving this algorithm based on what parents are telling us, with new twists every month. For example, this month we're looking at adding "unlocks of increased variance" periodically, to ensure kids don't snowball too far down a particular thematic path. We're also closing in on a release that will let parents play a more active role in unlocking or vetoing stories, if they're so inclined.

In a way, then, Bookboard is less an app and more of a service that brings scalability to a great librarian. You get the benefit of a thoughtful librarian delivered instantly to your home. For my family, this means less trips to the library and new books always and instantly at our fingertips. Sounds great.

But I read to my kids because everyone tells me how good storytime is for their emotional, intellectual, and psychological development.  Or, to use everyone’s favorite educational buzzwords: “to develop literacy.”

I wondered if there was any difference between reading to my kids on ebooks and print books. To find out, I turned to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at the Sesame Workshop. Led by Michael Levine, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is doing some of the best research I know of around education, child development, and new media.

I looked at their “quick report” entitled “Print Books vs. E-books.” The researchers, Cynthia Chiong, Jinny Ree, Lori Takeuchi, and Ingrid Erickson, looked at the quality of co-reading across three book formats: print books, basic e-books (“simple digitized versions of print books”), and enhanced e-books with “highly interactive, multimedia experiences.”  In short, they found little difference between basic e-books and print books.

  • “The basic e-book elicited similar levels of content related actions (e.g., labeling, pointing, and verbal elaboration of story features) from the children and parents as its print counterpart.”

  • “Across all book formats, children performed nearly equally when asked to explain a critical element in the story.”

  • “The print books were more advantageous for literacy building co-reading, whereas e-books, particularly the enhanced e-book, were more advantageous for engaging children and prompting physical interaction.”

So I’ll keeping doing both, reading print and digital books with my kids. We'll keep going to the library and unlocking books on Bookboard. The Association of American book publishers reports that e-books now make up 22.5% of all publishing revenue in U.S.; Other surveys, however, suggest that e-books have not penetrated the storytime market to the same degree. My boys and I seem to be in the minority because we don’t have a preference. Another Joan Ganz Cooney Center report revealed that 89.9% of surveyed iPad owners prefer to read print books to their kids.

Not so In my family. Paper is no longer an essential defining characteristic of the “book.” But neither are “words” or “stories;” magazines, webpages, video games and billboards can all claim both.

Before bed last night, I asked my kids, “what is a BOOK?” (This is what childhood is like for the offspring of a phenomenology professor). They explained that books have “Pages.”  Whether or not their definition holds up to philosophical scrutiny, it tells me something about the way they make sense of the world.

Books have pages.

Okay. But the definition of “book” is not so simple.

I visualize the cuneiform tablets on which the ancient Sumerians chiseled the Epic of Gilgamesh. I picture the Torah scrolls from which my nephew read scripture at his Bar Mitzvah last month.

I quickly make some trite generalized assumptions about technology, tools, evolution, stories, narrative, text, books. But they drift from my imagination as quickly as they formed: there’s nothing holding them still.

Besides, I’ve got more pressing things to worry about: my kids’ literacy and their ability to form articulate, critical thoughts. It is story time. So I adjust the pillow behind me and turn on the iPad.

On my iPad’s home screen, I discover that my seven-year-old son filed the Bookboard app in a folder called “Reading and Movies.” It shares a category with Netflix and Redbox Instant. The definition of “book” might be ambiguous, but clearly the definition of “streaming content” is not.

Jordan Shapiro is author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide to Maximum Euphoric Bliss and co-editor of Occupy Psyche: Jungian and Archetypal Perspectives on a Movement. For information on his upcoming books and events click here.