World Book Day 2021: Children, eBooks and Developing Literacy
With World Book Day 2021 being forced to go ahead online, the initiative is offering digital book tokens. These tokens are to be printed at home and spent in person — but with COVID-19 restrictions still in place why aren’t these tokens allowed to be spent digitally, and why not on children’s eBooks? Perhaps this is because of the controversy surrounding the benefits of children’s digital literacy and the ever-growing question: should children be reading eBooks? To answer this question, we must compare the benefits of the digital versus paper reading experience for children.
The Benefits of Children Reading Digitally
Despite the team at World Book Day’s apparent aversion to it, there are benefits to be had from children reading eBooks. Most notably, a 2010 study found that eBooks ‘with specially designed educational e-books may be a good avenue for promoting vocabulary and phonological awareness,’ suggesting that eBooks may have great benefits for children with developmental difficulties (Shamir, et al., 2012).
Reading digitally also allows for a more interactive experience that can cater to the child’s unique learning style. BookTrust offer several interactive eBooks, allowing the child to read, sing or use sign-language to follow the story. What’s more, eBooks that include a dictionary, can highlight individual words and have games included within the story have been found to help to promote children’s language and literacy skills (Lowry, 2017). This is something that World Book Day could easily have capitalised on, given that their mission is to ‘promote reading for pleasure.’ Even so, the benefits of paper books seemingly far outweigh those of digital books when it comes to childhood development.
The Benefits of Children Reading Paper Books
Equally, there are benefits to children learning literacy skills through more traditional means. Whilst eBooks can offer a more interactive experience, paper books can offer a more tactile experience. According to Scholastic, the handling of a traditional book, turning its pages and sharing with friends is a crucial part of literacy development.
Scholastic argues further that, despite the benefits that the interactive element eBooks can have to them, they can also distract the child from learning — ‘The technology is so exciting that the conversation focuses on what button to push instead of content’ (Deam, no date). As such, reading paper books can help to focus the child’s attention. The distraction that technology provides does not only provide distraction to children, but to parents as well. A study by the University of Michigan found that parents and children reading digitally were less likely to interact whilst reading — and that this interaction is important for the child’s development (BBC, 2019).
Furthermore, paper books offer a level of accessibility that digital books do not. Although it might seem that everyone has some kind of device with e-Reading capabilities nowadays, children from lower socio-economic backgrounds of may find that it is easier to access paper books through libraries and schools. This is more fitting with World Book Day’s aim to promote improve life chances for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The Changing Digital World
Perhaps given the wealth of evidence that paper books offer more benefits for children’s literacy than digital it is unsurprising that World Book Day have decided not to offer eBooks. The choice remains controversial, with 76% of parents still preferring print books for their children (Kucirkova and Littleton, 2016). One fact is for certain though — with the changing digital world around us, it would be wise for World Book Day to at least have eBooks as an option in the future.
References
BBC., (2019) ‘Story time with e-books “not as helpful” as print books’, BBC News. Available at: Story time with e-books ‘not as helpful’ as print books — BBC News (Accessed 04 February 2021).
Comerford, R., (2021) ‘World Book Day Forges Ahead In Lockdown’, The Bookseller. Available at: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/world-book-day-forges-ahead-lockdown-1234198 (Accessed 03 February 2021).
Deam, J., (no date) ‘E-Books vs. Print: What Parents Need to Know’, Scholastic. Available at: E-Books vs. Print: What Parents Need to Know | Scholastic | Parents (Accessed 04 February 2021).
Littleton, K., & Kucirkova, N. (2016). The Digital Reading Habits of Children [online]. UK: BookTrust. Available at: digital_reading_survey-final-report-8.2.16.pdf (booktrust.org.uk) (Accessed 04 February 2021).
Lowry, L., (2017) ‘E-Book or Paper Book — What’s Best For Young Children?’, The Hanen Centre. Available at: E-Book or Paper Book − What’s Best for Young Children? (hanen.org) (Accessed 04 February 2021).
Shamir, A., Korat, O. & Fellah, R. (2012). Promoting vocabulary, phonological awareness and concept about print among children at risk for learning disability: can e-books help?. Read and Writing, [online] 25, pp. 45–69. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-010-9247-x (Accessed 03 February 2021).
World Book Day. 2021. World Book Day. [online] Available at: <https://www.worldbookday.com/> [Accessed 26 February 2021].
