Kindle Fire Reaching Out to the Family
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Barnes&Noble announced an eye-opening statistic this year that the largest customer demographic to purchase (or receive as a gift) the Nook Color was middle-aged women, and after further scrutiny, that news made perfect sense. The Nook Color is a light-weight Android-based tablet which was promoted through media campaigns for simple e-reading of books and full-color magazines, yet offered app capability for more tech-savvy consumers. It was the housewife’s answer to the iPad, sleek and up with the times, but without the cost and superfluous features of a larger scale tablet PC.
Amazon’s introduction into the tablet world, the soon-to-be-released entertainment and internet-heavy Kindle Fire, has been touted as an “iPad for the rest of us,” a fully functional complement to Apple’s expensive tablet at a much less restrictive price point. With many of the same capabilities, such as downloadable apps, email and internet browsing, and live-streaming of movies and music videos, the Kindle Fire looks to be an all-in-one device without the iPad price tag.
Now, Kindle Fire is breaking into that B&N demographic by targeting parents with full-color children’s book titles that were simply not possible on the e-ink Kindle readers. According to an article by Teleread.com, Amazon is already listing more than 1,000 children’s book titles on pre-order for its new device. Unfortunately, in the world of children’s publishing, both Amazon and Barnes&Noble are still selling those titles for as much as $15.00, higher than many bestseller-list adult titles.
Hopefully, as more companies like Oceanhouse Media and iStoryTime continue to develop interactive children’s content for tablets through downloadable apps, the prices of some of the more popular children’s book titles will come down. A typical interactive title—and by interactive meaning it offers astounding features like the option of a human voice read-aloud, which neither Amazon nor Barnes&Noble have enabled on many of their children’s titles, as well as a tap-and-read feature which calls out words and displays them on the screen as young readers utilize the touch-screen—in the iTunes store runs between $1.99 and $3.99, a much more attractive price for parents who are simply looking to fill their tablets with great engaging yet educational children’s content.
Mercy Pilkington is a young-adult author and a teacher in a correctional facility. She does not have a single textbook in her classroom. With the top-of-the-line technology at her disposal and the low reading ability of many of her students, there’s no need for standard paper texts. Instead she relies on e-readers, iPads, desktop PCs, Polycom video conferencing equipment for virtual field trips, live streaming for science demonstrations, and text-to-speech read-aloud software to teach English and science. Within the next ten years, public school classrooms across the country are going to look a lot more like Mercy’s classroom because the educational possibilities with these kinds of technologies are limitless. Have a question? Send an email to mercypilkington@yahoo.com
- Guest
