Digital Books Finally Kill Print Books! Kids Immediately Stop Learning!

It’s true. All children’s publishers worldwide have stopped publishing print books and print magazines as of five minutes ago. From now on, all new books for children will have to be viewed on a computer or handheld device. A government agency is being set up to collect all print books across the globe and burn them. Children will be fitted with view screens and headphones. They will be worn at all times.

That was fun to write. Have I plugged into the fear accurately?

There’s a resistance to digital media in children’s education and I’m baffled by it. In conferences and blog comments in the children’s publishing world, I’ve noticed an undercurrent of fear about digital art and books on computer. The idea being that somehow those things aren’t “real,” and we must protect the “tactile experience” of reading.

You know what? I love the weight of a good print book. I grew up on print books and turning pages is a nice feeling. I have a fun collection of first edition children’s books and I enjoy picking them up and flipping through them now and then. I haunted the Carol Stream Public Library from 1976-1980. I’m one of those (whisper) “book hounds.”

So I love print books, but here’s the thing. Digital books will never completely replace them, but I welcome the new technology with open arms. It’s possible that as a mostly digital artist I am slightly biased. I sit here in front of my ginormous LCD monitor and the art looks huge and pretty.

I’m sure I’ll love the look and feel of it printed and bound on nice paper, too. I digress.

Here are some excerpts from a recent Los Angeles Time article, “Publishers of Children’s Books See Bright Digital Future:”

There is some evidence that younger children learn less when they’re reading books in electronic form. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University, studied parents who read digital books with their children and found that young children don’t get meaning from what they’re reading when they’re playing with gadgets and distracted by all the bells and whistles of technology.

“We have to be careful that electronic media is not a substitute for hands-on,” she said.

We have to be careful? This is the kind of language that irks me. No, we certainly do not have to be careful about reading and learning. It may be semantics, but being careful should be attributed to things like grease fires and driving in snow, not education.

We should be using whatever methods we can get our grubby hands on to teach kids. Kids today aren’t distracted by the bells and whistles of technology, adults are. Have you ever seen a kid sigh, take the mouse from an adult and say, “I know how to find it, just let me do it.” It’s almost a cliche.

The meaning of what the child is reading doesn’t automatically spill out of the computer any more than it spills out of a book. It’s the educator who is responsible for clarifying meaning that’s missed in the first read-through.

In short, it’s not the fault of the medium, it’s the facilitator. The content is the same.

The digital format adds something to tactile books, said Mary Ann Sabia, vice president and associate publisher of Charlesbridge Publishing Inc. It’s more interactive and gives children different insights into the story and characters, she said. Charlesbridge now has digital books that sing rhymes to kids and books accompanied by digital learning games.

Still, she said, “We don’t think that print books are going to disappear.”

Thank you for being a voice of reason, Mary Ann Sabia.

The world is always changing and as educators we need to keep up.

Kids don’t suffer anachronistic fools for long. Personally, I’d rather be in on the excitement now, leading the charge, than scratching my head later and wondering when everything suddenly got so complicated.

But please, please, I beg of you: do not use the word “careful” when you talk about reading or learning. That’s a recipe for mediocrity if I ever heard it.

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