Is Your Kid Ready for eBooks?
eBooks have been buzzing wildly around the kids’ media business of late. It’s one of those things that seems to be on everyone’s radar. Will we start to see picture books on the Kindle? The iPhone? How about on Barnes and Noble’s lovely new Nook? It’s not a huge surprise that the first to enter this arena in a big way is Disney, with Disney Digital Books. The fine folks at Disney invited me to an event a couple weeks ago to showcase this new product.
It’s hard not to get sucked in by the marketing razzle-dazzle. Disney is the world’s largest children’s publisher, and they own their own content so they’re in the perfect position to deliver 500 books to your digital doorstep. They chose online instead of a device because it is ubiquitous – they wanted the most children possible to have access, not to mention the superior picture quality (for now).
And then there are the features. Besides tons of titles featuring the television and movie characters (including Pixar), there are also Disney classics that you probably remember from your childhood. Books are categorized by character and by reading level. There are Look and Listen books that are read to you, but you can click on any word in any book and have it read to you (and you can even look it up with the dictionary function). There are trivia challenges that ask questions about the story text, and a space where you can build books featuring your favorite characters in a mad-libs-style way.
Sounds pretty good, huh? And yet, I wasn’t wowed when I got to spend some quality time with the site. There are a few strikes against it that make it a no for my house. For one, there aren’t quite enough Look and Listen books to make it worthwhile for my pre-reader. Another reason is a personal bias – it’s rare that I meet a media tie-in book that I like, and here’s a whole site of them (the TV tie-in books are particularly painful, with stills of the shows and snippets of dialog). Would I be more excited if it was full of Sendak and Scieszka and Seibold? Probably. The last strike I have is a personal bugaboo I have about digital page turns, as if to say “Look, see? We’re JUST LIKE a book.” Except it’s digital. Embrace it, I say!
But I didn’t want to dismiss the site because it does have a lot going for it, so I wondered if it was for someone older. Someone, say, who’s a huge fan of all things Disney. For this I turned to my 8-year-old Disney aficionado niece, Elizabeth. Her verdict? “It’s not for me,” she said. It’s somewhat heartening to know that she, like many of us old folks, prefer the tactile experience of a book. She couldn’t get a view of the book that made it easy for her to read. And, not realizing that you could turn it off, she was really distracted by the trivia questions that popped up throughout.
My sister thought she might stick with it through the Disney Fairy books, until I shared with her the jaw-dropping subscription price of $8.95/month. For a reluctant reader that digs the site this might not be too bad, but for the occasional user, this is far too much for those of us who already have cable and Netflix and mobile plans and Gamefly, etc.
So my question to you is this: is this something that you’d like for your family? If not this, are you open to the idea of eBooks for kids? How would you want that content delivered? On your reader? On your phone?
For book-based media, I think we’ll stick with our Tag for a while. Oh, and we’ll continue to curl up with our old-timey paper books as well.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:23 am
As someone who has children’s paper books manufactured for a living, I find this post reassuring. It’s good to know that there are still people who love the feel of holding a book in their hands and the action of physically turning the pages.