Are Children's Books Doomed?

[stonetools]

From the London Book Fair:

At the Digital Minds conference, there was a panel on children’s content publishing. Sara Lloyd, head of digital for Pan Macmillan, moderated a group that included Belinda Rasmussen from her own company, Eric Huang from Penguin, Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment, and Kate Wilson of Nosy Crow, which is a new children’s “book publisher” that seems much more focused on apps.

I have trouble seeing a future for book publishers in the kids’ content world. Everybody seemed to agree about what the apps of the future required (interactivity, game elements, animation) and that the parents of five years from now will be much more likely to hand their kids in the back seat an iPad than a book. So I asked them, as books diminish, what will publishers have to offer here? Wouldn’t this business belong to people who know gaming and animation, not books?

Kate seized the question from the stage and answered in a way that seemed to confirm my conjecture. “We don’t hire people with book experience,” she said. When I checked in with her later, she agreed that books were a revenue-generating convenience to get her company started. She sees the day when they won’t be part of her business anymore. What excited her (and well it should) was that they’d just made their fifth app and had created all the software tools they needed to build it while making the first four. The cost of creating their apps is plummeting because they’ve built the toolkit.

LINK

Seems that children's books -either of the print or the electronic variety- is going the way of the dodo bird. If there's a future Peter Rabbit or Peter Pan, its going to be an app.
Maybe a harbinger of the future is that my brother bought my nephews -aged 6 and 8-Ipod touches for Christmas.
So, no more children's books? And is that good or bad?

[petrucci]

Reading is still the best method to acquire large amounts of information quickly. Unfortunately, if children do not get started reading at an early age, then they may not develop the skill to read quickly. Thus, I feel that the loss of children's books would be a terrible thing.

[Barty]

Seems like children's books is one of the areas where pbooks still make sense. Kids need the physical, tactile aspect of books.

[RainingLemur]

I feel that losing children's books to apps and such would be terrible. As much as I like reading ebooks, I enjoy reading my demon-spawn their pbooks and the ones that I still have from when I was their age much more.

[ScalyFreak]

As long as there are parents who read books, there will be a market for children's books. I love reading. If I had a child, I can't imagine not sharing the wonderful worlds of books with him or her.

[Phogg]

Best Buy has an entire section of electronic readers (LCD, not Eink) that seems to sell well in my area.

I don't think ANY of the content for them is from the big six though, which could be why this article is written as if those units do not exist.

[carpetmojo]

Can't see it as long as the educational structure as well as parents support children's reading - not playing games.

[Jazzy_Jeffaz]

One way to get kids reading early on is to turn on close captioning on your TV.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Jazzy_Jeffaz

One way to get kids reading early on is to turn on close captioning on your TV.

...good one; and welcome aboard

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by Jazzy_Jeffaz

One way to get kids reading early on is to turn on close captioning on your TV.

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

...good one; and welcome aboard

It's not a bad idea, actually.

Me and several of my friends started learning English that way as kids. TV and movies in Sweden are subtitled, not dubbed, and reading subtitles while listening to the English voices was an easy way to learn new words and ways to use them.

[elemenoP]

Eh, I think there's room for all these things (books, apps, TV); it's just up to the parents to set limits on them. Kids using apps instead of reading books = bad, but kids using apps instead of watching TV = good (in my mind). Sure, the app market for kids (which is brand-new!) will grow a lot faster than the book market for kids, but that doesn't mean they will stop publishing new kids books.

>>One way to get kids reading early on is to turn on close captioning on your TV. <<

One of my sister's kids learned to read by using a video game (Animal Crossing). This game had a lot of text on screen, you had to read it or you wouldn't know what was going on in the game. He was *really* motivated to read that text.

On the other hand, I got my daughter those Leapfrog Tag books where you point at words and it reads them for you. She never played with it much, preferring *real* books even when she couldn't read them herself.

eP

[LovesMacs]

I don't think printed children books will be doomed until they develop tablets/ereaders that can be dropped, spilled upon, stepped on or thrown and still work.

[wyndslash]

a mixture of both would be great, i think. i really don't like that we have to choose either one. why can't we have both?

[Danskeron]

My friends and I are grappling with this question now. I've come down on the side of consistently reading every day with the kids (a la Alice Ozma's The Reading Promise), and incorporating a nook/ipad to accomplish this - mostly because I agree that kids will model what they learn early on and I can only see their future consisting of mainly electronic access to literature.

Outside of reading ebooks before bedtime, if we are out in a restaurant - we have a tablet with us. If they want to play a game, there's a time limit, with an equal time spent reading a book before earning more "game time". Plus there are some great apps for creating your own instant e-book by drawing pics and adding words. It's more about engaging their creativity to start "writing" their own stories or even make up their own games and then drawing the digital pics to accompanied what they are imagining. It's better than reality tv watching what the kids will come up with in the process storytelling - chocolate bunnies with magical kungfu that ride on the back of blue ponies and eat raw pizza dough (the source of their secret powers).

[spindlegirl]

Originally Posted by stonetools

So, no more children's books? And is that good or bad?

That would be terrible, but children's books I find are best with paper. My children inherited my husband's and my love for the library and picking out books. Literature has been a huge part of their early childhood and still is. I cannot see an identical history if it had been apps on a screen. (although computers also have been a big part too, with my husband being a computer geek)

There's something intimate and special about a child sitting on a parent's knee and pointing to their favorite pictures as the parent reads aloud....