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  • January 31, 2018

Good E-Reader - eBook, Audiobook and Digital Publishing News

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Why do kids prefer to read print and not ebooks?

March 14, 2016 By Michael Kozlowski 1 Comment

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Nearly two-thirds of children will always want to read print books even though there are ebooks available. Literacy advocate and teacher Donna Rasmussen thinks this is because “We are tactile creatures. We will judge books by their covers and that’s okay,” she said. “We do many creative things with books we can’t with digital, like building a poetry out of book spines.”

Recent research conducted by BookTrust in association with the Open University revealed that 76% of surveyed parents found their children prefer print books for reading for pleasure and 69% prefer print books for educational reading. As for interactive e-books, only 30% of parents said that their child prefers using them for reading for pleasure, and 34% for educational reading. Only 15% of parents said that children prefer using simple e-books for reading for pleasure and educational reading.

The study found that reasons for preferring print books over e-books included children enjoying turning the book’s pages, owning their own book and choosing books from the library.

One of the big reasons why kids read print is because when it comes to story-time, parents prefer reading a tangible book. A 2012 survey from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a New York-based non-profit dedicated to studying and promoting children’s reading, asked 1,200 parents who read with their children on what platform they preferred doing so and what platform they thought their children preferred. A majority answered “print” to both questions. Meanwhile, a November New York Times report  suggested parents don’t like reading to their kids digitally because of negative perceptions around screen time for children.

I think the main reason why kids like print better is because they can get a sense of progression. When you read a long printed book, you consciously or subconsciously track your progress by sensing the ratio of the pages read to the pages yet to be read. If the middle section is less interesting, you are more likely to ploy through by being encouraged that you are making physical progress through the book. This tactile feel of progress is an analog estimation and is more natural than a digital page number. If an eBook drags in the middle chapters, how often have you closed the file, never to open it again? Unless the subject is truly compelling, kids are unlikely to finish an entire eBook.

Michael Kozlowski (7557 Posts)

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about electronic readers and technology for the last four years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the Huffington Post, CNET and more. Michael frequently travels to international events such as IFA, Computex, CES, Book Expo and a myriad of others. If you have any questions about any of his articles, please send Michael Kozlowski an email to michael@goodereader.com

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Filed Under: Digital Publishing News, E-Book News

  • John Smith

    First, as someone who has spent a career in marketing research, I can tell you that I can design a study to reach any conclusion that I wanted and if you don’t know how the study was administered and *all* the questions that were asked — and their order — you can’t trust the results

    Second, it seems to me that the important data here were the trends in reading ebooks and whereas about 1 in 4 across all age groups read an ebook in 2010, by 2016 that increased to about 2 in every 3. That’s a massive increase.

    Third, we are at the inception of a dramatic cultural change in electronics and it takes time for that to move from use to acceptance; even among children. Availability affects opinion, as do parental influences and as ereaders/tablets become more ubiquitous, opinions will certainly change. There’s also the issue of constraint and it’s a lot easier for a parent to see their kid run out of the house with a book than with an expensive ereader so how many children are allowed to read ebooks outside the home? That’ll change as ereaders become cheaper but that’s a constraint on usage/acceptance now.

    Fourth, ereaders are about convenience for the young and *that* doesn’t start becoming a factor until the child is in their mid-teens or older … notice the uptick among older children vs young for ereaders. Of course, the *real* value of ereaders increases as the user ages and eyesight diminishes. Children are not an important demographic for ereaders, anyway.

    The bottom-line is that favorables for print books aren’t gonna go up in the future but those for ereaders/tablets almost certainly will as acceptance grows. The results for non-picture books will look much different in 5 years than they do now. All of that theorizing about “tactile” benefits of print books? Malarky. It’s all driven by custom and acceptance.

    In other words, these findings mean nothing and you shouldn’t trust anyone who tells you that they do because they’re either trying to fool you or they’re ignorant of a whole lotta things.

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