Enhanced ebooks are bad for children finds American study

All-singing, all-dancing ebook versions of children's stories might encourage kids to pick up a book, but they don't help with literacy, according to a new study.

Researchers at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center in New York worked with 32 pairs of parents and their three to six-year-old children for the small study, Print Books vs Ebooks, which gave each family a print book and either a basic ebook or an enhanced ebook version of the same title. Enhanced ebooks were found to distract children from the story, and their bells and whistles prevented children from remembering as many narrative details.

The news follows Gruffalo author and children's laureate Julia Donaldson's revelation last year that she had vetoed an ebook edition of the bestselling picture book. "The publishers showed me an ebook of Alice in Wonderland. They said, 'Look, you can press buttons and do this and that,' and they showed me the page where Alice's neck gets longer. There's a button the child can press to make the neck stretch, and I thought, well, if the child's doing that, they are not going to be listening or reading, 'I wish my cat Dinah was here' or whatever it says in the text – they're just going to be fiddling with this wretched button," she said at the time.

"The enhanced ebook prompted more non-content related actions (eg behaviour or device-focused talk, pushing hands away) from children and parents than the print books," found Cynthia Chiong, Jinny Ree, Lori Takeuchi and Ingrid Erickson in their study. "The enhanced ebook was less effective than the print and basic ebook in supporting the benefits of co-reading because it prompted more non-content related interactions. When adults prompt children with questions pertaining to the text, label objects, and encourage them to discuss the book contents in terms of their own experiences and curiosities, this elicits increased verbalisation by the child and can lead to improved vocabulary and overall language development."

Children reading enhanced ebooks also "recalled significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story", said the researchers, speculating that the extra features may be distracting. But while "print books were more advantageous for literacy building co-reading", ebooks, and particularly enhanced ebooks, were better "for engaging children and prompting physical interaction".

The researchers warned that designers should "exercise caution when adding features to enhanced ebooks, especially when those features do not directly relate to the story", and advised parents and teachers to steer clear of enhanced ebooks when prioritising "literacy-building experiences over ones intended 'just for fun'", because "some of the extra features of enhanced ebooks may distract adults and children alike from the story, affecting the nature of conversation and the amount of detail children recall". Enhanced ebooks should still be valued, however, "for their ability to prompt less motivated young readers toward engagement when they might otherwise avoid text altogether".

Chiong told the Guardian that enhanced ebooks "absolutely still have a place. Kids seem to love them. If enhanced books can engage kids who might not be as interested in reading, we will achieve an important goal. In our study, we were specifically looking at book-reading with a focus on learning and comprehension. That is only one of many purposes for reading. If the purpose is to just have fun or explore a classic tale in a new way, enhanced books are great."

The researchers now hope to run the study with a larger number of participants, they said.