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how phones changed society - example of how technology can change society's views

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how phones changed society - example of how technology can change society's views

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The Effect the Telephone Had on Literacy and Society | ETEC540: Text Techologies

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The Effect the Telephone Had on Literacy and Society

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2011 was Nosy Crow’s first year of publishing

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2011 was Nosy Crow’s first year of publishing

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In 2011, we published 23 books for children aged 0 to 14. 8 were board books. 7 were picture books. 8 were fiction titles for children aged 6 to 14. Here they are in reverse publication order finishing, at the time of writing but this will update as publication dates pass, in December 2011.

We published 3 apps: The Three Little Pigs, Cinderella and, just days before Christmas, Bizzy Bear on the Farm.

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2011 was Nosy Crow's first year of publishing. We published our first book in January.

It's been an incredibly busy and full year, and I find it hard to sort through the events and impressions of the past twelve months to write anything coherent.

But here goes...
The books and apps we published... and signed up
In 2011, we published 23 books for children aged 0 to 14. 8 were board books. 7 were picture books. 8 were fiction titles for children aged 6 to 14. Here they are in reverse publication order finishing, at the time of writing but this will update as publication dates pass, in December 2011.

We published 3 apps: The Three Little Pigs, Cinderella and, just days before Christmas, Bizzy Bear on the Farm.

We signed up a further 38 books and 8 apps for 2012, and already have projects scheduled for publication in 2013 and beyond. You can already find out about some of the forthcoming books (in publication order starting, at the time of writing but this will update as publication dates pass, in January 2012) and about some of the apps.
Selling at home and abroad
Working with Bounce, we had books sold and promoted in a huge range of UK sales outlets from independent booksellers through bookshop chains and online book retailers to supermarkets and toy shops.

We've travelled on Nosy Crow business and/or to speak at conferences to the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Holland, Italy, Mexico and Brazil.

We launched partnership deals with Allen and Unwin for book distribution in Australia; with Candlewick Press for illustrated book publishing in the US and Canada; with Carlsen for apps in German and with Gallimard for apps in French.

We sold rights to books in the following languages: French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Hebrew, Chinese, Norwegian, Greek and Korean.
Nosy Crow authors on the road
Nosy Crow authors were at numerous literary festivals, including Hay, Edinburgh, Bath and Cheltenham, and staged countless events in schools, libraries and bookshops.
Nosy Crow on the move
We moved offices from our second office in Lambeth to our third office in Southwark (it's always cheaper south of the river) as our staff grew from 8 to January 2012's 19, including part-time people and "attached freelancers". We've lost members of staff too (which is a real rite of passage). Two were only with us on a temporary basis and went on to roles that they had planned before they joined us, but Deb Gaffin has just left us to take on a marketing and partnership strategy role at Mindshapes. We are very grateful to her for helping us shape our first apps and the thinking behind them. Andi Silverman Meyer who has known Deb since they were at school together, and who has been fantastic at getting us US coverage for our apps, is joining Mindshapes too.
Spreading the word
We have reached a lot of people with Nosy Crow news of various kinds.

Nosy Crow as a company or Nosy Crow books or apps have been in the Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The Gadgetwise Blog of The New York Times, Wired Magazine, The Daily Mail, The Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent, The Scotsman, Prima, Junior, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus, School Library Journal, The Melbourne Age, The Australian, The Huffington Post and many great children's book, parenting, technology and app blogs. We've had terrific coverage in trade press and websites including Publisher's Weekly, The Bookseller, FutureBook, BookBrunch and The Literary Platform. The quickest look at the first few pages of a Google search result for Nosy Crow gives a sense of the range of coverage - and, where it's third-party coverage, how positive it's been. We've had more than our fair share of TV and radio coverage too, and coverage, through our Gallimard and Carlsen links in Figaro, Marie Claire and Buchreport.

This year, we had over 74,000 unique visitors from 161 countries to the Nosy Crow website and almost half a million page views. Over half of our visitors have returned to the site. The site's got information on everything from our commitment to paper-sourcing standards to our latest app reviews, and we've used the blog section of the site to write about subjects as diverse as library closures, Martin Amis, the thinking behind our apps, chocolate cake, the formation of the child reader, Steve Jobs, Charles Dickens, the role of supermarkets in bookselling and Wilson household New Year traditions.

From around 1,300 Twitter followers for @nosycrow (bit of a guess, this, but based on the numbers we had in September 2010) this time last year, we've built our @nosycrow following to over 5,700 and our @nosycrowapps Twitter following grew from 0 to over 1,800. I wrote about Twitter here. We've 1,250 Facebook fans.
Recognition
Our apps were included in so many "best apps" listings in the US, UK, France and Germany that it's difficult to list them here. They won several awards, including, most recently a KAPi award for best ebook and a FutureBook Award for best children's app which were both won by our Cinderella app. Our ratings in the iTunes app stores are excellent.

Our KAPi award

We won the Mumpreneur Inspiring Business Mum of the Year award, and have just been named in The Independent as one of the six book people or organisations who wrote glorious chapters in 2011
A measure of success
We invoiced over a million pounds in sales.
What went wrong?
It would be ridiculous to pretend it was a year without disappointments or irritations. The much-investigated drainy smell in the bathrooms at 10a Lant Street continues to baffle. The many cakes we make and eat continue to contain a lot of calories. Camilla had her bag stolen and we had to have all the office locks changed. There are one or two important UK retailers who still haven't stocked our books. There are several countries to which we'd hoped to sell rights but haven't yet managed to do so - Japan for example, but there are good reasons for that. We didn't always (though we did generally) agree what books we wanted to publish and how much we wanted to publish them. We offered for some books that we didn't manage to buy, a couple of which I still feel sad about. One or two books (and I mean "one or two": our strike rate has been good) didn't sell quite as well as we thought they would. We had to cancel a couple of projects because they just weren't working out the way that we'd planned.
Thank you
But it's been a very good year.

Whatever we achieved in this first year, we did it in partnership with our many authors and illustrators, new and established, and with other artistic collaborators, such as composers, audio experts and paper engineers. Without them, we have nothing to publish. We threw a party to say thank you. You can see the pictures at the top of our Facebook page.

Our author party in The Crow's Nest in Lant Street a few weeks ago

And whatever we've achieved in this first year, we did it thanks to the support of publishers abroad; booksellers of many kinds; librarians; reviewers; bloggers; literacy organisations; literary and illustrators agents; printers and print managers; talented freelancers; and, of course, the parents and grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends, teachers and librarians who have bought and read our books and apps to, with and for children.

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Looking back at 2011, our first year of publishing - Nosy Crow

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2011 was Nosy Crow's first year of publishing. We published our first book in January. It's been an incredibly busy and full year, and I find it hard to sort through the events and impressions of the past twelve months to write anything coherent. But here goes... The books and apps we published...

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Nosy Crow closes app department, makes three redundant 12/10

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Nosy Crow closes app department, makes three redundant 12/10

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Children’s publisher Nosy Crow is closing its in-house app department and making three members of staff redundant.

Kate Wilson, founder and m.d. of the company, said its apps cost a lot to make and the market for them had not developed "in the way that we would have liked".

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Children's publisher Nosy Crow is closing its in-house app department and making three members of staff redundant.

Kate Wilson, founder and m.d. of the company, said its apps cost a lot to make and the market for them had not developed "in the way that we would have liked".

"It seems that many parents don't choose to spend money on digital content for children and fewer children and their parents are reading on screen than we had hoped," she said.

Ed Bryan, head of apps development (creative), Will Bryan, head of apps development (engineering) and Andrew James, senior technical artist, are being made redundant following the closure of the division.

Wilson said it had been a "privilege" to work with the three employees, who she described as "remarkable, brilliant and creative".

She added: "Our print business is growing, with our UK sales out of bookshops (measured by Nielsen) up by 35% year-to-date, and with even stronger international sales and a great order book looking ahead. It makes sense for us to focus our resources on the resilient children's print market and on the area of the business where we are enjoying such success.

"We have learned so much from making apps in-house. It has enabled us to better understand what print can do that the screen cannot, making us better print publishers in the process. It has also encouraged us into areas of digital innovation - such as our successful Stories Aloud initiative, offering free audio readings accessed via a QR code printed on the inside of paperback editions of all of our picture books - that we would not have had the expertise or enthusiasm for had we not been so engaged in making the apps.

"Despite the closure of the in-house department, we will continue with, and doubtless come up with more digital publishing and marketing ideas."

The company has released a new app, Hansel and Gretel, and one final product, Flip-Flap Dinosaurs, based on Axel Scheffer's book of the same name, will be released in May. The company's previously released apps will continue to be available on the iOS App Store.

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Nosy Crow closes app department, makes three redundant

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Children's publisher Nosy Crow is closing its in-house app department and making three members of staff redundant. Kate Wilson, founder and m.d. of the company, said its apps cost a lot to make and the market for them had not developed "in the way that we would have liked".

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HQ, USA

3756 W. Ave. 40 Ste. Los Angeles, CA 90065 US

Tel: +1 (575) 404-9788

RUSSIA SALES

Sergey Trenin

Tel: +7 963 726-18-77 (Moscow)

Yaroslav - planetariums and educational projects

Tel: 8 800 707 57 01

INDIA SALES

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Unitech Habitat,

Sector PI-2,

Greater Noida, 201308

tel: +91 98113 01514

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China Official Documents
The Fulldome.pro company is officially headquartered in Los Angeles, USA and trading as 360Dome.pro. The Fulldome.pro trademark is officially registered in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao owned by the company.
Fulldome.pro in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao is now officially represented by two proprietary companies:
1. Fulldome World (Shenzhen) Technology Co., Ltd.
2. Shanghai Veda Culture Communication Co., Ltd.
Fulldome.pro also has other sales representatives in mainland China. All official dealers and sales representatives of Fulldome.pro have been provided with a letter of authorization to act on behalf of Fulldome.pro and to execute specific projects.
1.塔尖科技文化传媒（深圳）有限公司 - Spire Technology Culture Media (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.
2. 深圳魔秀文化科技有限公司（文旅事业总代理）- Shenzhen magic show Culture Technology Co., Ltd. (general agent of culture and Tourism)

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What is 360 dome theater? | Fulldome Pro

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3756 W. Ave. 40 Ste. Los Angeles, CA 90065 US Tel: +1 (575) 404-9788 Sergey Trenin Tel: +7 963 726-18-77 (Moscow) Yaroslav - planetariums and educational projects Tel: 8 800 707 57 01 Flat 403 Tower 17, Unitech Habitat, Sector PI-2, Greater Noida, 201308 tel: +91 98113 01514 No.8 building, No.

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A Comparison of Children’s Reading on Paper Versus Screen: A Meta-Analysis

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A Comparison of Children’s Reading on Paper Versus Screen: A Meta-Analysis

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This meta-analysis examines the inconsistent findings across experimental studies that compared children’s learning outcomes with digital and paper books

Adults’ mediation during print books’ reading was more effective than the enhancements in digital books read by children independently. However, with story-congruent enhancements, digital books outperformed paper books.

Furenes, M. I., Kucirkova, N. and Bus, A. G. (2021) ‘A Comparison of Children’s Reading on Paper Versus Screen: A Meta-Analysis’, Review of Educational Research, 91(4), pp. 483–517. doi: 10.3102/0034654321998074.

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Abstract

This meta-analysis examines the inconsistent findings across experimental studies that compared children's learning outcomes with digital and paper books. We quantitatively reviewed 39 studies reported in 30 articles (n = 1,812 children) and compared children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning in relation to medium (reading on paper versus on-screen), design enhancements in digital books, the presence of a dictionary, and adult support for children aged between 1 and 8 years. The comparison of digital versus paper books that only differed by digitization showed lower comprehension scores for digital books. Adults' mediation during print books' reading was more effective than the enhancements in digital books read by children independently. However, with story-congruent enhancements, digital books outperformed paper books. An embedded dictionary had no or negative effect on children's story comprehension but positively affected children's vocabulary learning. Findings are discussed in relation to the cognitive load theory and practical design implications.

Today's wide availability of digital reading devices and the rich tradition of children's paper books beg the question of which reading format is better suited for young readers' learning. While for readers with conventional reading skills, a systematic review and meta-analysis found that reading performance is greater with paper-based reading (see Clinton, 2019), there is no such cumulative evidence for readers between 1 and 8 years with emergent reading skills and reading routines that differ from those of conventional readers. Given that young children cannot decipher words independently, the question emerges whether digital books can provide the support emergent readers need to understand books on their own, without reliance on adults. A substantial body of experimental research focuses on comparing children's reading of digital books with print books, with evidence of both positive and negative effects on children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning. In previous studies, the difference in impact has been linked to the medium (paper vs. on-screen; e.g., Hoel & Tønnessen, 2019), the design of digital books (e.g., Christ, Wang, Chiu, & Strekalova-Hughes, 2019), and adults' support (e.g., Strouse et al., 2019). This meta-analysis sought to determine the relationships between some key children's learning outcomes and the reading of digital versus paper books, with a specific focus on the moderating effect of the design of digital books and the presence of literacy- and language-stimulating features, such as dictionaries and adult reading support. The focus of the meta-analysis is on digital books, also known as e-books, picture book apps, story apps, and iBooks, that have been available on the children's book market in various formats since the appearance of a desktop computer in the 1980s.

Current literature reports both positive and negative learning effects of young children's digital picture books, with several variables proposed to explain this variation. While digital enhancements aligned with the story content can support children's reading outcomes ( Christ, Wang, Chiu, & Cho, 2019), digital books with enhancements unrelated to the narrative can have a negative effect. In particular, the presence of short games embedded in story apps may explain children's poor comprehension of digital books, as these distract young children's attention from the story ( Munzer et al., 2019; Parish-Morris et al., 2013). Specific language-promoting features, such as embedded dictionaries that provide word definitions and follow story context ‎definition, were found to enhance children's word learning ( Korat et al., 2019). However, it is not clear how they impact story comprehension.

The inconsistent findings in the children's print-versus-digital reading raise the question of whether the pure presence of a screen makes a difference to children's learning, how the adults' reading support influences possible differences, and how the specific design features of digital books, such as the presence of a dictionary, affect children's learning outcomes. This meta-analysis aimed to determine the strength of these associations for 1- to 8-year-old children, that is, children at the earliest stages of their reading development also referred to in the literature as early or emergent readers, whose first experience of books is typically modeled and mediated by adults at home ( Teale & Sulzby, 1986).

Media Effects

Media or medium effect studies have a tradition in reading research, with three recent meta-analyses showing that reading on screen, when compared to reading on paper, is related to lower reading performance among adults, students, and secondary/primary school-aged children ( Clinton, 2019; Delgado et al., 2018; Kong et al., 2018). This finding is referred to in the literature as the so-called "paper advantage" and "screen inferiority" effect. Despite the cumulative evidence favoring paper to on-screen for conventional readers, there is no quantitative synthesis of outcomes related to the youngest children's reading on paper versus on-screen. Literature reviews that summarize evidence from print-digital comparisons as well as studies of digital reading only found children's emergent literacy skills to be positively related to digital books ( Biancarosa & Griffiths, 2012; Bus et al., 2015) but also to print books (e.g., Miller & Warschauer, 2014). Given that the human information processing system has a limited capacity ( Mayer, 2009), distributing cognitive resources across the story narrative, handling the device, and children's expectations concerning an electronic device may be the reason for the reported negative effects. When children have to use a mouse or finger to activate hotspots and turn pages, they have to allocate some of their limited cognitive resources to point, click, and swipe while still following the narrative, which may negatively affect meaning-making ( Lauricella et al., 2014). Furthermore, many children may constantly search for possibilities to interact with electronic devices, as they are accustomed to game-like activities. On the other hand, many studies suggest that children are more attentive to and engaged in reading digital books than paper books. For instance, in a study by Richter and Courage (2017), both 3- and 4-year-olds were more inattentive during the paper-based reading, and they also spent more time looking off-task than they did in the digital book reading session.

In light of this evidence, our first goal in this meta-analysis was to establish whether the medium per se (paper vs. screen) affects children's story comprehension and learning of new vocabulary.

Digital Design Effects

Traditionally built books and educational television programs are rapidly giving way to digital content on electronic devices, shifting the early learning environment at home and in school for very young children. Considering the low costs and accessibility, digital books supplement or fully provide the reading materials in low-income families ( Picton, 2014) or developing countries ( Jere-Folotiya et al., 2014). Reading on-screen has significant practical advantages for adults and children who cannot read together in person (e.g., in the case of pandemic lockdowns, displacement of families for work, war conflict, or health reasons). Thus, the question is not whether digital books are better than paper books but rather whether digital books open up new opportunities for book reading and how digital books could be optimized to increase children's learning. In other words, the focus on digital design effects is not on the overall difference a reading medium makes but on what is contributed by the specific enhancements in digital books.

Types of Enhancements

In this meta-analysis, we were less interested in enhancements that serve aesthetic purposes (even though these may increase children's interest and enjoyment of reading) but more in enhancements that target cognitive skills to facilitate children's story comprehension. Especially promising are the so-called digital storytelling enhancements that focus children's attention on the storyline, ranging from synchronizing visualizations with the narration that facilitate the integration of visual and verbal information to using techniques that encourage children's curiosity about new story events, which facilitate the processing of narration ( Eng et al., 2019; Sarı et al., 2019; Verhallen et al., 2006).

Most digital books include voice narration that "reads" the book to the child, making adults' direct reading of the text unnecessary. However, there is likely to be a difference in relation to the type of voiceover provided by automated recordings and the dramatization provided by real adults. These audio enhancements afford a new kind of book reading experience to children that in various ways may qualitatively differ from a reading experience of sharing paper books with an adult. For instance, in a recent study, parents of 2- and 3-year-old children were provided with access to a reading platform that included film-like digital books with a voiceover ( Bus & Anstadt, 2020). The analytics that registered which days children were logged in and which books were read each session showed that children read more books in one session and repeated the same books more often than reported for regular book reading sessions.

When individual features are aggregated under the broader category of multimedia, there is evidence of learning benefits of digital stories equipped with animated pictures, music, and sound effects ( Takacs et al., 2015). However, this evidence comes from a meta-analysis that took a broad definition of digital texts and included film and television shows presented on television sets, computers, and other electronic devices, as well as stories that did not include a narrative. For studies that directly compare digital and paper-based reading of narrative texts, it is not clear whether children's learning outcomes can be explained through the extent to which the digital books include multimedia affordances or not. This clarification was the second goal of our meta-analysis.

Dictionary Effects

In light of the central importance of vocabulary learning for children's language development ( Clark, 2009), researchers and designers have been interested in enhancing children's reading experience with an online dictionary. Dynamic and static dictionaries were among the first enhancements embedded in digital texts, with visual and audio explanations of words, teaching young children either explicitly or implicitly through picture correspondence the meaning, pronunciation, and orthography of story-related vocabulary. Reading print books with dialogic support, which includes an explanation of new words, pointing to them in the text, and contextualizing them to the child's extant knowledge, significantly boosts children's book-related vocabulary as well as vocabulary on nontargeted measures of expressive vocabulary ( Hargrave & Sénéchal, 2000). In contrast, parents' natural reading behaviors that do not draw children's attention to the words in the story collide with children's processing of the story. Observation studies show that parents rarely pay explicit attention to difficult words in narratives, possibly because parents intuitively sense that word explanations would disrupt the flow of the reading session ( Evans et al., 2011). In addition to studies with parents, several studies examined the effect of a dictionary in digital books, with or without adult support. For example, Korat et al. (2013) compared 4- to 6-year-olds' learning in relation to different types of vocabulary support available during digital book reading and found a clear hierarchy in the extent to which the support was beneficial for children's vocabulary acquisition: adult support was most effective, followed by a dynamic dictionary, static dictionary, and no support. In another study, children's receptive and expressive word learning of target words was studied in relation to a digital book with a dictionary read with adult (mothers') support or independently by the child ( Korat & Shneor, 2019). The presence of the dictionary was beneficial for the mothers' mediation of difficult words and children's word learning from digital books. In both Korat et al. (2013) and Korat and Shneor (2019), vocabulary acquisition was the only outcome measure; it was not tested whether explaining words interferes with story processing. Our third goal in this meta-analysis was to establish whether a dictionary affects the differences in learning outcomes when comparing digital and print books and, if it does, in relation to which learning outcomes.

Adult Support Effects

The advent of digital enhancements that provide targeted learning prompts and reading scaffolds for children's language learning is open to the possibility of replacing adult support with technology. This possibility can be framed in technophobic ideologies with technology replacing humans but also in terms of technology supplementing absent or unskilled parents and teachers. From a sociocultural perspective of learning, some form of scaffolding during children's reading is indispensable for them to acquire not only reading skills but also the important life skills that co-occur with reading stories, which include the emotional experiences of fictional story heroes as well as real-life examples ( Gee, 1991; Rueda et al., 2001). Scaffolding can take the form of verbal support by the reading partner (e.g., a parent asking a child a question about the main story character), or it can be embedded in the digital book as a prompt (e.g., a written and audio-recorded question is activated when the child taps on a hotspot in the digital book). From a sociocultural perspective, the benefits of scaffolds in digital books depend on their relevance for the child's story understanding and the possibility of combining the built-in digital scaffolds with adult guidance. While sharing a digital book, a verbal and digital prompt can mutually reinforce or interfere with each other.

Studies that compared digital and print reading with and without the adult presence have found various effects. For 5- to 7-year-olds at risk for learning disabilities, children's independent reading of a digital book was more beneficial for their vocabulary than a print book read by an adult ( Shamir et al., 2012). For special needs children, automated reading of a computer was as effective as an adult reading of a print book for their vocabulary learning ( Segers et al., 2006). A meta-analysis ( Takacs et al., 2014) that investigated children's comprehension and word learning from print books as compared to digital picture books, film, and television shows found that for children's story comprehension, reading multimedia-enhanced digital stories was more beneficial than reading print books without adult guidance. There was no difference in children's comprehension when stories enhanced with multimedia were compared to reading print books with adult guidance, which suggests that adults' scaffolding might be of similar effect to well-designed multimedia books read by children on their own.

A main assumption in the book reading paradigm is that adults who guide children to story-relevant details and who include comments on the story plot and language-stimulating features are more likely to increase children's learning than adults not engaging in such dialogic reading behavior. Rvachew et al. (2017) attempted to promote adult scaffolding by including questions in digital books, but these were not beneficial for story comprehension outcomes. Other studies suggest that enhancements in digital books are difficult to combine with parent guidance: an enhanced digital book prompted more non-content-related interactions (e.g., device-focused talk, pushing hands away) from children and parents than paper books or digital books without enhancements ( Chiong et al., 2012). Our meta-analysis' fourth goal was to establish whether and how adults' support during the book reading session influences children's learning with digital and print books.

Outcome Measures

Stories open a window on other people's emotions and behaviors, thus providing relevant knowledge for functioning in society ( Wilson, 2014). This makes book reading from an early age vital for children's social and cognitive development ( Dickinson & Morse, 2019). Given the important role of stories, a main outcome measure of book reading is children's narrative comprehension that encompasses not only understanding actions but also people's emotional and behavioral reactions. Assuming that storybook apps are more than a passing fad, the question of how the transition from print to digital books affects the act of meaning-making becomes more pressing. Children's vocabulary learning has attracted considerable research interest due to the well-documented evidence that books provide a unique context for learning new words rare in daily conversations (e.g., Hindman et al., 2012). There is no doubt that young children expand their vocabulary when exposed to books ( Bus et al., 1995), but it would be erroneous to assume that word learning is the main aim of book reading. Children may learn individual word meanings from reading texts. However, the promotion of word learning should not be at the expense of book reading's key reasons-children's narrative comprehension, which is basic to enjoyment (e.g., Kelley & Kinney, 2017). To enable a critical test of the hypothesis that isolating words and discussing their meaning outside the narrative context may hinder story comprehension, we included both outcomes (vocabulary and story comprehension) in this meta-analysis. We compare books with and without a dictionary expecting that dictionaries positively affect word learning, but they may interfere with meaning-making.

The existing empirical literature (e.g., Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2005; Justice et al., 2005) does not corroborate the hypothesis that book reading is a source for connecting word pronunciation to its orthography. Therefore, we excluded basic reading outcomes, such as phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, or print knowledge, as outcome measures in our meta-analysis. Nor did we examine the effects of book reading on the adult-child relationship ( Dickinson & Morse, 2019). Emerging evidence suggests that responsive and language-rich exchanges between adults and children are often missing in digital book reading, likely because many digital books are not designed to combine built-in affordances with parent-child book sharing. Such digital books may even complicate shared reading because the e-books' interactive features hinder adult-child interaction ( Richter & Courage, 2017).

Research Questions

Overall, in light of the extant literature, this meta-analysis was guided by four research questions:

1. Do digital books have the same effect as paper books on children's story comprehension and vocabulary if the only difference is the reading medium (paper vs. digital)? If not, which medium is more beneficial?

2. Can the design of digital books explain the beneficial effects of digital books, especially if the enhancements support children's understanding of the storyline?

3. How does the presence of a dictionary interact with other enhancements and affect the outcomes?

4. How does the support provided by adults during the book reading session influence the findings?

Method

Initially, we identified 33 potentially relevant articles with the "snowball" method (using reference lists from key papers in the field) and the "invisible college" approach (using key figures in the field to collect recent and unpublished materials), out of which 21 met all the inclusion criteria ( Bus et al., 2021). We then performed a systematic literature search in bibliographic databases (Science Direct, Web of Science, PsychINFO, Education Resources Information Center, Academic Search Complete, PubMed) using various combinations of the following search terms: ebook* OR e-book* OR "electronic book*" OR "story app*" OR "picturebook app*" OR "digital book*" OR "digital stories*" OR "digital reading*" OR "e-reading*" OR "multimedia stories*" OR "interactive stories*" OR "CD-ROM stories*" OR "DVD stories*" AND "pre-school*" OR preschool* OR kindergarten* OR "early child*." We created new combinations of terms using the three main Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) until all relevant papers from the initial set of 21 articles had recurred. This way, nine additional articles/reports were identified. As the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) flow diagram reports, after the initial screening based on title and abstract, 194 records were excluded, and 46 references were retrieved for full-text screening (see Figure 1). In this set, 30 publications met the inclusion criteria and were included in the meta-analysis. All searches and screenings were performed independently by the first and third authors.

Our inclusion criteria were the following: (1) the study needed to follow an experimental or quasi-experimental design with a contrast between reading a narrative in a digital and print format; (2) the study needed to include children aged between 1 and 8 years (inclusive); (3) the narrative text in digital books could be available both ways, in print and/or orally; (4) the digital reading format can be accessed on any digital device; (5) the study included as outcome measures children's story comprehension and/or vocabulary; (6) articles needed to be written in English, Dutch, German, or Norwegian, but the study could have been conducted in any country; (7) studies needed to provide effect sizes or sufficient information (means, standard deviations, and sample sizes or frequency distributions for treatment and control groups at posttest) to enable calculation of effect sizes.

The focus of the meta-analysis was on studies that reported quantitative comparisons of reading a paper and digital version of the same story. We therefore excluded (1) studies without a control group (e.g., Klop et al., 2018; Messier & Wood, 2015) and case studies (e.g., Boyle et al., 2017, making use of a single-case multiple baseline across participants design); (2) studies that included comparisons between paper on the one hand and video, an audio story, or a film on the other hand were excluded (e.g., Meringoff, 1980); (3) apart from studies just focusing on behavior during book reading (e.g., Moody et al., 2010; Rees et al., 2017) we did not include studies targeting basic reading skills such as letter knowledge or phonemic awareness (e.g., Evans et al., 2017; Segal-Drori et al., 2010; Willoughby et al., 2015) or recognition of kana characters (e.g., Masataka, 2014); (4) we also excluded studies targeting participants older than 8 years (e.g., Connor et al., 2019) and participants with Cochlear implants (e.g., Messier & Wood, 2015) or diagnosed with autism (e.g., Wainwright et al., 2020).

Data Coding and Reliability

The authors' descriptions of digital books were by and large minimal in all the meta-analyzed studies. If available online, we looked up the title to understand the digital enhancements in the book. Each study was coded by digital book features, namely, whether the book was commercially produced or researcher-developed; whether or not a voiceover was available; the print was visible; highlighting print while the text was read aloud; and interactive enhancements to support story comprehension or word learning. The most common genre was fiction. Books were coded as nonfiction where facts and a narrative storyline coexisted, for instance, to introduce the life of a polar bear and her two cubs living in the Arctic (e.g., Zhou & Yadav, 2017). Enhancements were coded as story-related enhancements when the book enabled interaction to support story comprehension; for example, in Elmo Goes to the Doctor, the user can click each character in the waiting room and see why each one is at the doctor's office ( Lauricella et al., 2014); in the Tractor in the SandBox, hotspots elicit comments from characters that expand on the text ( Korat & Shamir, 2007); in A Frog Thing, tapping hotspots reactivates story-congruent multimedia features such as a creaking door ( Richter & Courage, 2017); in Confused Yuval, the computer prompts a question answered by clicking on a location on the screen ( Shamir et al., 2012). We ignored automatic dynamic visuals, which might guide children's visual attention to story elements and/or prompt a surprise ( Bus et al., 2015). In the books that we could access, dynamic visuals mostly missed these purposes and seemed to be added mainly for aesthetic reasons. We did code enhancements meant to teach story-related vocabulary. For instance, in The Polar Bear Horizon story, children see and hear word labels as soon as they touch on the corresponding illustrations on the screen ( Zhou & Yadav, 2017); in Tacky the Penguin, the reader can tap on individual pictures to make the name of the object or action pop up and hear the word spoken aloud ( Zipke, 2016).

We also coded adult mediation: whether children received adult guidance while reading the paper book and/or the digital book. There were studies in which an adult guided the reading of both books; an adult guided the paper book reading but not the digital book; or children read both books by themselves. For the latter, as an example, O'Toole and Kannass (2018) studied how children listened in both conditions to a recording of the experimenter's voice, and although the experimenter was present during the session, she kept interactions to a minimum and did not provide commentary or answer children's questions about the story.

Furthermore, we coded sample characteristics (country, language(s) used in the intervention, socioeconomic status [SES; overall low SES, middle to high SES or a mix, as defined and categorized by the authors of the individual studies], and children's age range in years), publication year and status (published in a journal or unpublished dissertation or report), and indicators of design quality, particularly number of participants (overall and in individual conditions), type of design (quasi-experiment, cluster randomized control trial, randomized control trial, within-subject design), attrition rate, and blinding. Based on this information, we coded five domain-based risk of bias criteria using three categories (low risk, some concern, high risk): (1) bias arising from randomization; (2) bias due to deviations from the intended interventions (more risk of bias with group-wise interventions carried out by other persons than the researcher, as compared to individual interventions carried out by the researcher); (3) bias due to missing outcome data (attrition rate); (4) the bias in measurements (examiners were not blinded for the experimental condition to which participants were assigned); (5) selection bias due to paper and digital book group differences in gender or SES or other relevant variables at pretest.

We coded postintervention outcome measures, including indicators of story comprehension and vocabulary (mean and standard deviation, t test, F test, r, p value, frequency distributions, and sample size per test). Indicators of story comprehension were the number of correctly answered questions about the story content, the quality of a retelling (e.g., Neuman et al., 2017, gave each story element-setting, characters, events, plot or theme, resolution-one point), or a sequencing task (e.g., Neuman et al., 2017, selected five pictures with event scenes per story and based on the number of events in the correct order the child received a total score ranging from 0 to 5). Indicators of children's vocabulary were the receptive knowledge task assessing children's ability to identify a word from an array of three or four color pictures, balanced with two or three foils (i.e., similar appearance, similar function, and similar category); the expressive naming task examining the children's ability to provide a label when given a picture (i.e., "What is this?") or completing a sentence at a picture; the definition task prompted the child for a definition (e.g., Leacox & Jackson, 2014) used as a first prompt, "What does __ mean?"; and a second prompt queried further description, for example, "What else do you know about ___?"

The first and last authors coded all studies. Cohen's kappa was computed for 19 variables, which yielded coefficients between .63 and 1.00, which is considered substantial to perfect agreement. Disagreements were resolved by consulting the original reports and discussing the issues until consensus was reached.

Meta-Analytic Procedures

The Comprehensive Meta-Analysis computer software (Version 3.3; Borenstein et al., 2009) was used for analyzing the data. The standardized differences between the mean of a digital book and the mean of a paper book at posttests were computed to quantify a potential additional value of digital books compared to a paper book version of the same story. Hedges' g was calculated using posttest scores (means and standard deviations) of the digital and paper book condition or by transforming reported test statistics (e.g., t, F, r) into Hedges' g. A positive effect size indicates a favorable outcome for the digital book, while a negative effect implies a better result for print books. Given that studies with an increased sample size provide more reliable estimates of the population mean due to a smaller standard error, effect sizes were determined by weighting each outcome by the inverse of its variance ( Cooper & Hedges, 1994; Lipsey & Wilson, 2001).

Effect sizes were aggregated within the two domains-story comprehension and vocabulary-before being averaged across studies. Assuming a distribution of true effect sizes in our sample, a random-effects model was preferred to a fixed model when we pooled effect sizes (see Borenstein et al., 2010). A study was defined as an outlier if the individual study's confidence interval did not overlap with the confidence interval of the pooled effect ( Harrer et al., 2019; Viechtbauer & Cheung, 2010). Funnel plot analysis was used to examine publication bias due to the reduced likelihood of publication of studies with nonsignificant findings. To detect bias due to the underrepresentation of studies with small sample sizes that are less likely to be published, the effect sizes of each study's outcome measures were plotted against the inversed standard error. The "trim and fill" method was used to calculate the effect of potential publication bias ( Duval & Tweedie, 2000a, 2000b). We also computed the fail-safe number: the number of studies with null results that would have to exist to overturn the effect of book format on story comprehension and vocabulary to a level of no significance ( Lipsey & Wilson, 2001).

We report three types of heterogeneity measures. Significant Qs indicate that the separate effect sizes are heterogeneous; they do not estimate the same population's mean effect size ( Lipsey & Wilson, 2001). I ² tells what proportion of the variance is due to variation in real effects rather than sampling error ( Borenstein et al., 2017). Prediction intervals estimated with tau-squared (τ ²) help give us a range for which we can expect the effects of future studies to fall based on our present evidence in the meta-analysis. If the prediction interval lies completely on the positive side favoring the digital book, we can conclude that despite varying effects, the digital format might be at least in some way beneficial in all contexts that are studied in the future. If the confidence interval includes zero, we can be less sure about this, although it should be noted that broad prediction intervals are quite common. To compute prediction intervals for the mean effect sizes in this meta-analysis, we used a spreadsheet prepared by Michael Borenstein (updated August 10, 2019).

To explain heterogeneity, we tested several moderator variables: digital book features (story-related enhancements, dictionary, voiceover, highlighted print); whether or not children received the same adult guidance during both paper and digital reading or only during paper book reading; sample characteristics (SES, the age range of participants, number of subjects); research quality (random assignment); and publication characteristics (publication outlet, publication year). Moderator analysis was carried out by applying a meta-regression model or by contrasting subsamples. To avoid a lack of power in the search for differences between subgroups, we only contrasted subsamples when subgroups contained a minimum of four studies.

Results

Characteristics of Studies

We found 39 studies in 30 articles/reports in which learning from a paper book is compared with learning from a digital book. These articles/reports included 1,812 children. They are marked with an asterisk in the References list and are included in Table 1 with descriptive information. The bulk of studies ( n = 25) was carried out between 2010 and 2019, and for the greater part in the last 4 years ( n = 16); only four studies appeared between 2002 and 2010. Most articles/reports ( n = 21) originated in the United States followed by Canada ( n = 4), Israel ( n = 4), and the Netherlands ( n = 4). Most studies ( n = 23) were concerned with 4- to 5-year-old children, a smaller number also included 6-year-olds ( n = 14), and very few focused on 1- to 3-year-olds ( n = 2). Although some studies ( n = 9) included children mainly from low SES families, most studies focused on children from middle or high SES families ( n = 13) or families from low as well as middle/high SES ( n = 14).

Selected characteristics of studies included in the meta-analysis

The internal validity of the studies was generally satisfying. Only four articles/reports (seven studies) were estimated to have a high overall risk of bias. Figure 2 presents a summary of the authors' judgments broken down for each risk of bias criterion across all included studies (not weighted for sample size). The risks of deviation from intended interventions and bias in measurement were quite high. In more than half of the studies, the intervention was riskier for optimal implementation because the intervention took place in the classroom or family (e.g., Broemmel et al., 2015; Ihmeideh, 2014). In many studies, the bias in the measurement of the outcomes was judged as rather high because assessors were not blinded for the condition; the person who carried out the assessment was aware of the condition to which participants were assigned (e.g., Chiong et al., 2012; De Jong & Bus, 2002; Robb, 2010). On the other hand, the attrition rate was predominantly low, thus keeping the risk of bias due to missing data low. Likewise, most studies scored low on bias due to randomization. All studies were experimental, mostly using random assignment to the paper and digital condition at the level of the individual ( n = 21). Fourteen studies used a within-subject design counterbalancing the paper and digital book (e.g., Lauricella et al., 2014). Last, there was not much evidence of selection bias due to paper and digital book group differences in gender or SES or other relevant variables at pretest.

More studies ( n = 28) involved books from the commercial market than researcher-developed books ( n = 11). In very few studies ( n = 5), digital books only differed from paper books on account of the presence of the screen (e.g., Krcmar & Cingel, 2014; Strouse & Ganea, 2017). Most digital books included additional features. A minimal addition was a voiceover, audio-recording of the text in the book ( n = 34). In nine studies, the voiceover was the only additional feature in the digital book. In most studies ( n = 29), the print was visible in the digital book but not always highlighted while the text was read aloud ( n = 16). Thirteen digital books were enhanced with a dictionary and no other enhancements. Eighteen books included story-related enhancements (e.g., expanding on the text or illustrations to support meaning-making), in addition to or instead of a dictionary. In many studies ( n = 18), the book was presented on a touchscreen device. Particularly the books in older studies needed mediation with a computer mouse. The adult role varied across the studies: In a small number of studies ( n = 6), adults were present but did not provide any support during the reading session. In 13 studies, the adult provided support in the print condition with, for example, answering questions or discussing the images, but not in the digital book condition. In 20 studies, an adult was present in both the paper and digital conditions and provided support when necessary.

There were no significant effects of sample size or design (RCT vs. within-subject) on the two outcome measures. To test the effect of publication status on comprehension, we contrasted four unpublished studies with the rest ( n = 22), but the difference was not significant ( p = .221). Publication status could not be tested for vocabulary because all studies were published in peer-reviewed journals. For vocabulary, we found a positive effect of year of publication showing higher effects favoring the digital books as the study was more recent ( z = 2.84, p = .005), which means that over the years, the digital books had a stronger effect on vocabulary. This may indicate that the quality of the digital book has been improving. As we did not find a similar effect for studies targeting comprehension, the improvement may be confined to enhancements for vocabulary.

Story Comprehension

Medium Effects

Twenty-nine studies involving 1,192 children ( n digital = 797, n print = 760) reported effects on story comprehension. The studies by Altun (2018), one of the two studies by Chiong et al. (2012), and De Jong and Bus (2004) were considered outliers following Harrer and colleagues' criteria ( Harrer et al., 2019) and excluded from further analyses. The remaining 26 studies show varying effects, sometimes favoring digital books and sometimes print books (see Figure 3). The average difference approached zero ( g = −0.07), and the confidence interval (CI) included zero (95% CI: [−0.17, 0.04]), indicating that studies favoring paper were in balance with studies favoring digital. Given the broad prediction interval ranging from −0.47 to 0.34, we can be overly confident that results will also be heterogeneous in future scenarios. The funnel plot showed asymmetry around the point estimate. After imputing two studies with small sample sizes, the effect size slightly increased in favor of paper books from −0.07 to −0.10, 95% CI [−0.20, 0.02]. Zero was still included in the confidence interval, indicating that the difference did not favor paper nor digital books. The interaction between medium and genre was not significant. In studies that were carried out in a school setting paper books outperformed digital books ( k = 9, g = −0.28, 95% CI [−0.42, −0.15]), while studies at home ( k = 5, g = 0.08, 95% CI [−0.17, 0.32]) or lab studies ( k = 12, g = 0.06, 95% CI [−0.06, 0.18]) did not show this preference for paper books, Q(2) = 15.56, p < .001. This may indicate that digital books were the least useful in the mostly group-based reading sessions in schools. As the prediction interval (−0.49, −0.07) did not include zero, we can be confident that the print books' effect is robust in future studies in schools. From the characteristics of the participants, only socioeconomic background interacted with the medium. In studies that included low SES families, paper outperformed digital, while in samples that mainly included middle or high SES families, digital and paper had the same effect, Q(2) = 6.71, p = .010. The prediction interval indicates that not all future studies will favor print books when low SES families are involved. Meta-regressing comprehension on the median of the age range in individual studies did not reveal a significant effect (see Table 2).

Main effect and moderator analyses with story comprehension as outcome measure

Digital Design Effects

In some studies ( k = 10), the paper and digital book formats were almost the same except for minimal additions to the digital book: a voiceover and/or (sometimes) highlighted print. In those cases, paper outperformed digital ( k = 10, g = −0.22, 95% CI [−0.36, −0.08]). Future studies are also expected to favor paper books when the enhancements in digital books are minimal; the prediction interval ranged from −0.38 to −0.06. Most studies, however, focused on enhanced digital books (16 out of 26 studies), enabling children to interact with the book, thereby receiving additional information about story content or the meaning of infrequent words. When digital books included enhancements, paper no longer outperformed digital ( k = 16, g = −0.03 [95% CI: −0.18, 0.11]) nor did digital outperform paper. As the prediction interval ranged from −0.43 to 0.37, it might be very well possible that future studies show similar variation, probably due to the type of enhancements. The shift away from favoring paper only approached significance, Q(1) = 3.48, p = .062.

Dictionary Effects

Only five studies focused on digital books that included a dictionary and no other enhancements. This small subset of studies did not show a preference for digital or paper, k = 5, g = −0.05, 95% CI [0.32, 0.23], and given a broad prediction interval ranging from −0.86 to 0.76: future studies may likely show the same variation. The other 11 studies targeted enhancements that focused on the story, sometimes combined with a dictionary ( n = 3). The preference for digital to paper increased if the enhancements did not include a dictionary. If the digital book included both enhancements, digital books tended to do worse than print books ( k = 3, g = −0.20, 95% CI [−0.40, 0.01]). In contrast, digital books were more effective than paper books if the enhancements in the digital book concerned only story content and not word meanings ( k = 8, g = 0.17, 95% CI [0.01, 0.32]). Given a prediction interval ranging from −0.03 to 0.36, we may expect that some future studies focusing on books with content-related enhancements might include outcomes that favor paper above digital, probably due to how well enhancements tie in with the storyline. Enhancements targeting the story content supported story comprehension, but the enhancements interfered with comprehension of the digital book if they were combined with a dictionary. Considering the low numbers of studies in the subgroup that included both enhancements ( k = 3), we cannot rely on the Q-statistic revealing a significant effect across these additions ( Q[2] = 7.79, p = .020).

Adult Support Effects

Studies differed in adult support, which may have interacted with the medium (paper vs. digital) and enhancements in digital books. In follow-up analyses, we, therefore, tested the effects of enhancements controlling for adult support. In seven out of 26 studies, children received adult support in the paper book condition but not in the digital condition. In this small subset, the paper condition outperformed the digital condition, k = 7, g = −0.22, 95% CI [−0.38, −0.06], meaning that the enhancements available in this set of digital books did not outweigh the adult support while sharing a paper book. Given a prediction interval ranging from −0.43 to -0.01, we might expect similar outcomes in future studies. However, it should be noted that the digital books tested in the seven studies were far from optimal: only three books' enhancements targeted the story content while the other four books included a dictionary, alone or in addition to content-related enhancements. Next, we tested whether enhancements in digital books affected comprehension when adult support was the same in the paper and digital conditions. In most studies, both conditions involved adult support ( n = 14), while in a few studies, neither the paper condition nor the digital condition involved adult support ( n = 5). In this set of 19 studies, the paper book outperformed the digital book when the digital book was not enhanced ( k = 10, g = −0.22, 95% CI [−0.36, −0.08]. Six out of 10 effect sizes were negative. The prediction interval ranged from −0.38 to −0.06, indicating a high probability that studies show negative effects in future studies. When, however, the digital book was enhanced with a content-related enhancements the difference favored the digital book ( k = 5, g = 0.20, 95% CI [0.03, 0.36]). Four out of five effect sizes were positive. According to the prediction interval (−0.06, 0.46), we cannot exclude that future studies show negative effects. If enhanced with a dictionary scores ranged around zero ( k = 4, g = 0.04, 95% CI [−0.21, 0.28]). In other words, if the amount of adult guidance was the same in the digital and paper book conditions, then reading digital books without enhancements was less effective than reading paper books, but the balance shifted in favor of digital books, particularly when enhancements were content-related; Q(2) = 14.68, p < .001.

Vocabulary Learning

Medium Effects

Twenty studies reported effects on vocabulary. After excluding four outliers ( Harrer et al., 2019), these studies included 881 children ( n digital = 557, n print = 488). Focusing on vocabulary tests, the random effect on language was positive and significantly different from zero ( k = 18, g = 0.20, 95% CI [0.08, 0.32]), which implies that digital books were more effective for vocabulary development than paper books (see Figure 4). Given the broad prediction interval ranging from −0.09 to 0.49, which stretches well below zero, we cannot be overly confident that the positive effect we found for digital books is robust in every context. It might be very well possible that digital books do not yield positive effects in some future scenarios. The fail-safe number representing the number of studies required to refute the significant meta-analytic mean equaled 55. To solve asymmetry around the point estimate, six studies with small sample sizes were imputed. As a result, the effect size dropped from 0.20 to 0.09, which was no longer significantly different from zero (95% CI = [−0.04, 0.23]). The interaction between medium and genre was significant. When nonfiction books were included, the differences were more in favor of digital than with fiction, Q(1) = 7.87, p = .005. The 12 studies with only fiction did not reveal differences between paper and digital ( k = 12, g = 0.09, 95% CI [−0.03, 0.22]) and according to the prediction interval (−0.09, 0.27), we might expect similar results in future studies. The six studies that also included nonfiction showed a higher score in favor of digital ( k = 6, g = 0.42, 95% CI [0.23, 0.61]). The prediction interval predicts a similar result for future studies (0.15, 0.69). Apparently, digital books were more suitable than paper books to highlight complex concepts in nonfiction books. Location or child characteristics (SES, age) were not related to the outcomes.

Digital Design Effects

When the print was visible in digital books enabling children to see the word's orthography, digital outperformed paper ( k = 13, g = 0.25, 95% CI [0.13, 0.37]), and future studies might show the same result (the prediction interval was positive ranging from 0.11 to 0.38). At the same time, the outcomes were highly variable when print was not visible in digital books ( k = 5, g = 0.12, 95% CI [−0.15, 0.39]). The visible print was in 10 out of 13 cases highlighted while the text was read aloud. When digital books included story-related enhancements, attracting children's attention to the story, word learning from digital no longer outperformed paper ( k = 7, g = 0.10, 95% CI [−0.09, 0.28]. The prediction interval ranging from −0.36 to 0.56 indicates that we might expect the same variation in future studies. Digital books without story-related enhancements, by contrast, were more facilitative of word learning ( k = 11, g = 0.29, 95% CI [0.14, 0.45]), and it is very well possible that we find the same outcomes in future studies given a prediction interval between 0.11 and 0.47. However, the interaction between the medium and story-related enhancements in digital books was not significant, Q(1) = 2.53, p = .112.

Dictionary Effects

Ten of 18 studies included a dictionary ( k = 10, g = 0.20, 95% CI [0.03, 0.38]), suggesting a positive effect of such digital books on word learning. Given the broad prediction interval (−0.29, 0.69), which stretches well below zero, we cannot be overly confident that the positive effect we found for a dictionary is robust in every context. It might be very well possible that such digital books do not outperform print books in some future scenarios. Further exploration indicates that digital outperformed paper when the digital book had a dictionary and no other enhancements ( k = 4, g = 0.49, 95% CI [0.23, 0.74]), even though the prediction interval does not completely exclude that paper outperforms digital in future studies (prediction interval: −0.06, 1.04). The contrast between digital and paper was no longer significant when the book included other enhancements in addition to the dictionary ( k = 6, g = 0.09, 95% CI [−0.11, 0.28]). Given the broad prediction interval (−0.45, 0.63), we may expect the same in future studies. With a dictionary alone, digital was more beneficial for word learning than paper but this effect disappeared when the digital book also included story-related enhancements, Q(1) = 5.83, p = .016. To explain these findings, we may assume that a dictionary was no longer beneficial when words were only occasionally explained, as may be expected when enhancements also targeted the story content (see Table 3 for details).

Main effect and moderator analyses with vocabulary as outcome measure

Adult Effects

Controlling for adult guidance was not possible due to the small number of studies.

Discussion

This meta-analysis aimed to establish whether the medium (paper vs. digital), in and of itself, has a substantial effect on children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning and, if it does, whether it is moderated by the enhancements available in digital books, including story-related enhancements and/or a dictionary, and/or adults' presence during the reading sessions. We found that when the paper and digital versions of the story are practically the same and only differ by the voiceover or highlighted print as additional features in the digital book, then paper outperforms digital. Previous meta-analyses targeting more advanced readers ( Clinton, 2019; Delgado et al., 2018) found an interaction between the screen inferiority effect and the reading genre in that screen inferiority was evident for expository texts but not for fiction. Our meta-analysis does not reveal a similar effect for story comprehension, probably because nonfiction at this early age often provides information that is mostly embedded in a narrative storyline which makes fiction not very different from nonfiction. However, we found an interaction for vocabulary learning in a different direction than that reported in Delgado et al.'s (2018) meta-analysis, which showed screen inferiority for nonfiction, but not for fiction. In the six studies that included nonfiction books, core words to convey information such as "privacy" or "cub" were targeted by the digital enhancements, which may explain that children show a higher score on vocabulary in favor of digital.

Our findings are in line with studies comparing the interactions between adults and children while sharing a digital or print book. Several studies showed that conversations during digital book reading were dominated by talk about the device or the child's behavior rather than the story content as is common with print books (e.g., Chiong et al., 2012; Parish-Morris et al., 2013; Richter & Courage, 2017). Low SES children have more difficulties comprehending digital books than print books, possibly because children from low SES families are more used to game-like activities when interacting with digital devices ( Bus & Neuman, 2009). As a result, they may target the interactive features in digital books and pay less attention to the story content. The screen-inferiority effect is strongest in a school context probably because in school, sessions are mostly group-based, and group-based sessions are difficult to reconcile with the digital book format that often includes interactive enhancements ( Hoel & Tønnessen, 2019).

The screen inferiority effects can be moderated or overcome by the design of the digital books and/or the adults' mediation. When enhancements target the story content, for instance, by prompting children's background knowledge and/or providing additional explanations of events, these books not only outweigh the negative effects of the digital device on story comprehension, but they even outperform print books. On the other hand, a dictionary has no or negative effect on children's story comprehension, indicating that focusing attention on word meanings distracts children's attention from the story content. When adult mediation is the same in print and digital, digital books with content-related enhancements stimulate children's story comprehension more than paper books. In line with a previous meta-analysis ( Takacs et al., 2014), we expected that the adults' mediation during the reading of paper books would be as effective as the enhancements in digital books read by children independently. However, the current findings suggest that adult guidance outperforms the effects of enhanced digital books. This result may reflect the rather low quality of enhancements in the digital books in the small subsample enabling a comparison of adult guidance with enhanced digital books read independently. Only in a few studies enhancements were optimal (i.e., just targeting the storyline and not the vocabulary).

For enhancing children's vocabulary, digital books are more effective than paper books. This is especially the case for digital books that include a dictionary that defines infrequent words and expressions. The dictionary is most effective when used on its own and not in combination with other content-related enhancements, which corroborates the theory that it is hard to combine both activities: engaging in a story and concentrating on word meanings. Nonfiction books seem to be particularly helpful for learning new words, most probably because the enhancements in these books aim at teaching new concepts such as "privacy" (e.g., in Zhang-Kennedy et al., 2017, the story is about Cyber heroes maintaining their secret identities on the Internet), thus making word learning a natural component in the digital books. Interestingly, children's learning of new vocabulary is further promoted when the words' orthography is visible like in the paper book and simultaneously highlighted, as was the case in 10 out of 13 studies. This finding aligns with Rosenthal and Ehri's (2008) conclusion that the word's orthography supports word learning.

Theoretical Implications

The finding that the device may negatively interfere with meaning-making is in line with the cognitive load theory ( Kahneman, 1973) and Mayer's (2009) model of multimedia learning, positing that the human information processing system has a limited capacity. According to this theory, each channel of information processing (audio or visual) has a limited capacity, and an overload of information interferes with learning. In the studies examined in this meta-analysis, the device seems to attract young children's attention at the expense of attention paid to the storyline, even when the content of the paper and digital books was the same. The parsimonious resources available for processing the main information in picture books-the central narrative-may have been misallocated to the means of achieving it (e.g., point, click, and swipe), thus hampering meaning-making. Another source of interference may be that children expect interactivity because they are accustomed to game-like activities and are actively searching for such possibilities, which distracts their attention from the story. Thus, the increased demand placed on cognitive resources when children read digital books might be a performance disadvantage ( Fisch, 2000).

The same theory can explain why the design of some digital books can interfere with story comprehension more than others. When the enhancements are aligned with the story content, they contribute to meaning-making, but enhancements that do not support the storyline distract children and diminish their meaning-making. Albeit novel and exciting, additional information such as word definitions may quickly overload the human capacity to learn. Processing word definitions means that cognitive resources are no longer available for processing the storyline. Consequently, a dictionary may limit meaning-making. In the same vein, the capacity model, first introduced by Fisch (2000) in relation to TV-based narratives and the influence of their design on children's learning, explains why some enhancements negatively affect meaning-making. Fisch's (2000) model introduced the notion of distance that he defines as the "degree to which the educational content is integral or tangential to the narrative" (p. 64). If we apply this model to our findings, we can conclude that if the distance between the narrative and the enhancements in digital books is small, both can complement one another rather than compete for cognitive resources, and thereby increase children's meaning-making of the narrative. Following this line of reasoning, we could expect that enhancements that are close to the main narrative can promote children's engagement and support greater story comprehension.

Originally proposed by Vygotsky (1978), sociocultural theory views learning and development of higher mental functioning, such as the cognitive and language skills necessary for reading, as a collaborative product of social interaction between children, adults, and sociocultural tools, such as written systems in the forms of books. In line with this theory, we hypothesized that enhancements in digital books, often modeled after adult guidance, may either outweigh or further support adult mediation. While the prompts embedded in a digital book might scaffold a child's understanding and cognitive learning outcomes such as vocabulary learning, the target books in the current set of studies appear insufficient for the complexity of a sociocultural learning process. The current findings show that children's meaning-making benefits more from adult mediated print book sessions than from enhanced digital books that children read on their own, thus suggesting that adults are better able to attune their support to children's needs. However, interpreting this finding, we also need to consider that the digital books in the current set of studies were not optimally enhanced, thus thwarting a fair comparison of digital enhancements with adult mediation. Most of the books were not equipped with an enhancement that supports children in comprehending the storyline. Given the digital reading format's flexibility for redesign and the current technology advancements (e.g., machine learning and artificial intelligence may enable new forms of interactivity), more research that compares adult mediation with more optimally designed digital books is needed.

Study Limitations

It matters which enhancements are embedded in digital books when comparing reading on paper versus on-screen. We could make a rather rough distinction between content-related enhancements and a dictionary and show different effects but failed to make more fine-grained distinctions. For instance, content-related enhancements may differ in how coherent they are with story content. This might be a core element for meaning-making (see Christ, Wang, Chiu, & Cho, 2019; Kucirkova, 2019). Due to the small numbers of studies, we were unable to test the effect of such a distinction. Second, due to the limited set of enhancements in the meta-analyzed studies, the potential of digital books may be undervalued by the current findings. For instance, embodied actions may raise the empathy-building potential of narratives and have a powerful effect on meaning-making ( Kucirkova, 2019). Children may remember a story better if they can physically manipulate objects referred to in the story, thus stimulating the user's empathy with the character's doubts and feelings, potentially deepening story comprehension ( Bus et al., 2020). Third, the enhancements in the current set of studies limited the comparisons between children's reading with adult support and children reading digital books independently. Although in the current set of studies enhancements did not outweigh adult guidance, future studies should further explore whether a sensible system of digital storytelling techniques may be powerful enhancements of picture book apps that outweigh or complement adult guidance. Fourth, in the studies that we meta-analyzed, only a few authors included reading motivation as an outcome measure, even though we may expect that interest in reading is one of the main outcomes of book reading (e.g., De Bondt et al., 2020). Last, most studies involved children in the age range of 4 to 5 years, making it hard to generalize the current findings to infants or the older children who are at the transition from emergent to conventional readers.

Practical Implications

Reading stories on a digital device means managing the device, which may negatively affect processing the story content (cf. Lauricella et al., 2014). Nevertheless, digital books for young children can outperform paper books when they meet a minimum quality standard. The books include enhancements that increase children's meaning-making of the narrative, for instance, by prompting children's background knowledge or providing additional explanations of story events. Based on inspiring prototypes grounded in multimedia learning theory, the research suggests that digital techniques can create new possibilities. However, designers need to be selective with the type of enhancements they include in the books. With a few exceptions, the commercially published books in the current set of studies did not involve digital storytelling techniques that are similar to what adults do when they share a story with a child, such as attracting children's attention to the main story elements and thus focusing their attention on the chain of story events (e.g., Bus et al., 2015; Eng et al., 2019).

Our meta-analysis showed that some enhancements help children's word acquisition but not meaning-making. Notably, a dictionary in digital books that defines words and expressions rare and unknown to a young reader promotes vocabulary learning but harms meaning-making. The finding that the presence of rather common enhancements such as a dictionary may interfere with processing the storyline points to the need for a careful balance between book reading's main aims. Despite the importance of vocabulary development, it seems preferable to include enhancements that align the main aim of book reading-meaning-making and elaborating on the story content. In other words, digital book designers need to be careful with popular additions that may be helpful for isolated outcomes such as vocabulary learning, but not for the reading session overall. The practical recommendation that we can infer from the findings for teachers and parents/caregivers is to pay close attention to the design of books they use with young children and select books with content-related enhancements. Seemingly small and attractive design differences, such as the presence of a dictionary, may hinder children's meaning-making. Our findings could extend existing guidelines for designers and policymakers (e.g., The International Collective of Research and Design in Children's Digital Books) and inform new policy documents for educators and educational professionals.

Future Directions

Future research needs to explore books that include more sophisticated digital storytelling enhancements. The efficacy of digital books strongly depends on the quality of digital storytelling enhancements. In new experiments, the selection of enhancements should be carefully considered in light of the cognitive load theory and the body of evidence concerning the distracting and enabling effects of digital books' enhancements. The creation of picture book apps equipped with new digital storytelling techniques requires, in addition to an author and illustrator, the involvement of competent designers creative in finding ways to support story comprehension and arouse the readers' curiosity about what will happen while children are reading the story.

Most studies in the digital reading domain focus on effects concerning children's learning rather than reading routines even though we may expect that, due to a transition from print to digital, not just the reading materials will change but also the established home and school routines of book reading sessions. Digital books may significantly change established reading sessions, given that they include a voiceover and other digital features that make the story content accessible without adult mediation. It follows that digital books may elicit forms of book reading that are uncommon with print books, such as, for example, increased repetition of favorite texts, leading to children's greater exposure and discovery of more layers in stories. This is an exciting prospect for both research and practice of children's digital books.

Note
This study was supported by Grant No. 275576 from the Research Council of Norway.

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Authors

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A Comparison of Children's Reading on Paper Versus Screen: A Meta-Analysis - May Irene Furenes, Natalia Kucirkova, Adriana G. Bus, 2021

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Abstract This meta-analysis examines the inconsistent findings across experimental studies that compared children's learning outcomes with digital and paper books. We quantitatively reviewed 39 studies reported in 30 articles (n = 1,812 children) and compared children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning in relation to medium (reading on paper versus on-screen), design enhancements in digital books, the presence of a dictionary, and adult support for children aged between 1 and 8 years.

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Welcome to the UNICEF Global Portal on Accessible Digital Textbooks for All

UNICEF and its partners are driving an innovative solution called Accessible Digital Textbooks for All, to make textbooks available, affordable and accessible for children with disabilities in all contexts. We cherish the printed word, but it isn't always accessible to everyone. Children with disabilities remain one of the most marginalized and excluded groups and, for them, gaining access to quality education can often be challenging. By adding specific features to digital formats and following Universal Design for Learning principles, textbooks can be made accessible to students who are blind or have low vision, to those who are deaf or hard of hearing, and to those who have intellectual, developmental or learning disabilities, among others. And it doesn't stop there: these features can enrich the learning experience for all children.

The initiative brings writers, publishers, teachers, organizations of persons with disabilities, technologists and ministry of education representatives together to develop the guidelines needed to produce textbooks in accessible digital formats. They jointly set standards for features like narration, sign language, interactivity and the audio description of images. The Accessible Digital Textbooks for All initiative improves access to education, helping all children to learn and thrive together.

The global portal is designed to promote knowledge sharing and to support the development and implementation of the Accessible Digital Textbooks for All initiative.

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UNICEF and its partners are driving an innovative solution called Accessible Digital Textbooks for All, to make textbooks available, affordable and accessible for children with disabilities in all contexts. We cherish the printed word, but it isn't always accessible to everyone.

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Bookshare | An Accessible Online Library for people with print disabilities

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Bookshare makes reading easier. People with dyslexia, blindness, cerebral palsy, and other reading barriers can customize their experience to suit their learning style and find virtually any book they need for school, work, or the joy of reading.

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children prefer printed books to e-books

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children prefer printed books to e-books

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The study revealed that 76% of surveyed parents found their children prefer print books for reading for pleasure and 69% prefer print books for 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

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Survey finds 76% of children prefer print books

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Children prefer print books to e-books for both reading for pleasure and reading for education, a study by reading charity BookTrust has found. Recent research conducted by BookTrust in association with the Open University investigated the use of digital media and e-books by young children, with particular focus on children's reading for pleasure and shared reading with their parents at home.

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Technology and Language Learning: Assessing the Influence of Prior iPad Experience

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Technology and Language Learning: Assessing the Influence of Prior iPad Experience

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However, my findings suggest children’s interaction with an iPad as either a gaming device or learning mechanism does not exclusively account for children’s ability to learn from an iPad. Numerous factors, outside of what I measured in the current study (e.g., motivation, self-efficacy in language learning, and student attitudes), may also play a role in children’s educational affordances (Scibora, Mead, & Larson, 2018).

i.e. partially disproves Salomons theory in their essay "television is easy and print is tough"

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Electronic books versus adult readers: effects on children's emergent literacy as a function of social class

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Electronic books versus adult readers: effects on children's emergent literacy as a function of social class

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Korat &Shamir, 2007; segers &Verhoeven, 2002

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Ofra Korat, 58A, Hanasie St, Herzlia, 46399, Israel. Email: korato@mail.biu.ac.il

Abstract

Abstract We compared the effects of children's reading of an educational electronic storybook on their emergent literacy with those of being read the same story in its printed version by an adult. We investigated 128 5- to 6-year-old kindergarteners; 64 children from each of two socio-economic status (SES) groups: low (LSES) and middle (MSES). In each group, children were randomly assigned to one of three subgroups. The two intervention groups included three book reading sessions each; children in one group individually read the electronic book; in the second group, the children were read the same printed book by an adult; children in the third group, which served as a control, received the regular kindergarten programme. Pre- and post-intervention emergent literacy measures included vocabulary, word recognition and phonological awareness. Compared with the control group, the children's vocabulary scores in both intervention groups improved following reading activity. Children from both interventions groups and both SES groups showed a similarly good level of story comprehension. In both SES groups, compared with the control group, children's phonological awareness and word recognition did not improve following both reading interventions. Implications for future research and for education are discussed.

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Electronic books versus adult readers: effects on children's emergent literacy as a function of social class

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Ofra Korat, 58A, Hanasie St, Herzlia, 46399, Israel. Email: korato@mail.biu.ac.il Abstract We compared the effects of children's reading of an educational electronic storybook on their emergent literacy with those of being read the same story in its printed version by an adult.

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Exposure and Use of Mobile Media Devices by Young Children

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Exposure and Use of Mobile Media Devices by Young Children

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Hilda K. Kabali, Matilde M. Irigoyen, Rosemary Nunez-Davis, Jennifer G. Budacki, Sweta H. Mohanty, Kristin P. Leister and Robert L. Bonner

Pediatrics December 2015,  136 (6) 1044-1050; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2015-2151

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Study Questionnaire

We developed a 20-item questionnaire (in English and Spanish) adapted from the Zero to Eight Common Sense Media 2013 nationwide survey. The questionnaire was determined to have face validity by senior faculty (M.M.I., R.L.B.) but was not tested for reliability. Demographics included child's age in years (<1, 1, 2, 3, or 4 years), gender, ethnicity, and parent education. Parents were asked whether they had previously completed the survey.

To determine children's access to media, we asked parents about media platforms and Internet connectivity in the household and whether their child had his or her own media platform. Media platforms were categorized into 4 types: television, mobile devices, computers, and video consoles. Mobile devices were categorized into 3 types: smartphones, iPods, and tablets (eg, iPad, Kids Tablet, Kindle eBook reader, Samsung Galaxy Tablet, Microsoft Surface Tablet). Computers included desktops and laptops. Video consoles included Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo.

To determine children's age at first use, we asked parents, "How old was your child when she/he first did various activities on a mobile media device?" The activities listed were touched or scrolled screen, called someone, played video games, watched television shows, and used apps.

To understand the circumstances under which parents let their children use mobile devices, we asked parents, "How often do you let your child use the mobile device when out running errands, doing chores around the house, keeping your child calm in public places, or putting your child to sleep?" Response options were "often," "sometimes," "hardly ever," and "never."

To measure children's frequency of use of media, we asked parents, "How often does your child watch television, play video games on a console, use a computer, watch video/television shows and/or use apps on a mobile device?" Response options were "several times a day," "once a day," "several times a week," "once a week," "less than once a week," and "never." We combined responses into "daily" (several times a day, once a day, several times a week), or "less than daily" (once a week, less than once a week, never).

To measure children's screen time, we asked parents, "How much time did your child spend yesterday by him/herself watching television, playing video games on a console, watching video/TV shows and/or using other apps on a mobile device?" Response options were "none," "less than 30 minutes," "about 30 minutes," "about 1 hour," and "more than one hour." To compare findings with the 2013 Common Sense Media survey, we created a continuous time variable by assigning a value in minutes to each response: "none" = 0 minutes, "less than 30 minutes" = 15 minutes, "about 30 minutes" = 30 minutes, "about 1 hour" = 60 minutes, and "more than 1 hour" = 90 minutes.

We asked parents how many apps they had downloaded for their child and the name of their child's most commonly used apps. For each app, we researched the description from the developer. Given the lack of a comprehensive, uniform rating system of apps by either industry or an independent consortium, we categorized apps based on the developer's description as educational (to promote cognitive development), entertainment (to entertain, any cognitive benefit was secondary), and content delivery (to serve as a portal to mostly passive content, such as movies, cartoons, and video clips).

To assess children's ability with mobile devices, we asked parents, "Does your child need any help to navigate the mobile device?" and "How often does your child like to use more than one type of media device at a time?" Responses were "always/most of the time," "sometimes," and "never."

Data Analysis

In the analysis, we excluded repeat surveys. Statistical analysis was done with SPSS version 21 (IBM SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation), with additional analysis and visualizations in Tableau version 8 (Tableau Software, Seattle, WA). We evaluated the survey data by using descriptive and bivariate analysis. Survey responses varied in completeness, and we report the sample size and response rate for each question. We used bivariate analysis (χ ²) to examine the relationship of child gender, age (in years), ethnicity (African American, Hispanic, all others), and parent education (less than high school, high school, some college, college graduate or higher) on the following outcomes: child mobile device ownership, child used mobile device before age 1, and frequency of mobile device use (many times a day vs daily or less). To delineate the characteristics of the study population, we aggregated the zip codes of the raffle participants and did a comparative demographic analysis with the US Census Bureau American Community Survey data for the 5-year data 2009 to 2013.

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Exposure and Use of Mobile Media Devices by Young Children

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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Research on children's use of mobile media devices lags behind its adoption. The objective of this study was to examine young children's exposure to and use of mobile media devices. METHODS: Cross-sectional study of 350 children aged 6 months to 4 years seen October to November 2014 at a pediatric clinic in an urban, low-income, minority community.

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academic study: Promoting Early Literacy in Pediatric Practice: Twenty Years of Reach Out and Read 6/10

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academic study: Promoting Early Literacy in Pediatric Practice: Twenty Years of Reach Out and Read 6/10

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Shared book reading is 1 of the most important developmental activities parents can engage in with their children

Barry zuckerman 2009

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academic study: Differences in Parent-Toddler Interactions With Electronic Versus Print Books

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academic study: Differences in Parent-Toddler Interactions With Electronic Versus Print Books

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conclusion: Parents and toddlers verbalized less with electronic books, and collaboration was lower. Future studies should examine specific aspects of tablet-book design that support parent-child interaction. Pediatricians may wish to continue promoting shared reading of print books, particularly for toddlers and younger children.

Tiffany G. Munzer, Alison L. Miller, Heidi M. Weeks, Niko Kaciroti and Jenny Radesky

Pediatrics April 2019,  143 (4) e20182012; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2012

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Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Previous research has documented less dialogic interaction between parents and preschoolers during electronic-book reading versus print. Parent-toddler interactions around commercially available tablet-based books have not been described. We examined parent-toddler verbal and nonverbal interactions when reading electronic versus print books.

METHODS: We conducted a videotaped, laboratory-based, counterbalanced study of 37 parent-toddler dyads reading on 3 book formats (enhanced electronic [sound effects and/or animation], basic electronic, and print). We coded verbalizations in 10-second intervals for parents (dialogic, nondialogic, text reading, format related, negative format-related directives, and off task) and children (book related, negative, and off task). Shared positive affect and collaborative book reading were coded on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 = high). Proc Genmod and Proc Mixed analyzed within-subjects variance by book format.

RESULTS: Parents showed significantly more dialogic (print 11.9; enhanced 6.2 [ P < .001]; basic 8.3 [ P < .001]), text-reading (print 14.3; enhanced 10.6 [ P = .003]; basic 14.4 [ P < .001]), off-task (print 2.3; enhanced 1.3 [ P = .007]), and total (29.5; enhanced 28.1 [ P = .003]; basic 29.3 [ P = .005]) verbalizations with print books and fewer format-related verbalizations (print 1.9; enhanced 10.0 [ P < .001]; basic 8.3 [ P < .001]). Toddlers showed more book-related verbalizations (print 15.0; enhanced 11.5 [ P < .001]; basic 12.5 [ P = .005]), total verbalizations (print 18.8; enhanced 13.8 [ P < .001]; basic 15.3 [ P < .001]), and higher collaboration scores (print 3.1; enhanced 2.7 [ P = .004]; basic 2.8 [ P = .02]) with print-book reading.

CONCLUSIONS: Parents and toddlers verbalized less with electronic books, and collaboration was lower. Future studies should examine specific aspects of tablet-book design that support parent-child interaction. Pediatricians may wish to continue promoting shared reading of print books, particularly for toddlers and younger children.

What's Known on This Subject:

When preschoolers read electronic books with parents, parents may show less dialogic reading, and talk is often focused on the technology. It is not known whether toddler-parent interactions differ when reading commercially available electronic books compared with print.

What This Study Adds:

Parents engaged in more dialogic reading with fewer technology-related verbalizations and more parent-toddler verbalizations with print books compared with electronic books. Print books elicited a higher quality of parent-toddler collaborative reading experience compared with electronic books.

Methods

Study Design

We conducted an experimental, laboratory-based study consisting of a video-recorded free play, book-reading protocol, and surveys lasting ∼75 minutes. Toddler-parent dyads were assigned to 1 of 36 counterbalanced book-format orders. Parents were compensated $50 for participating. The University of Michigan Institutional Review Board approved this study.

Participants

We recruited 37 parent-toddler dyads from the University of Michigan online research registry (UMhealthresearch.org) and community-based settings, including pediatric offices, child care centers, and community centers. To not bias recruitment toward parents with particular digital media views, language stated generically that the study involved coming to the University of Michigan, where "you and your child would be videotaped while playing with toys and books." Parents contacted researchers via the research registry, e-mail, or phone and underwent phone-based screening. Inclusion criteria were as follows: (1) child age 24 to 36 months, (2) child did not have a developmental delay or serious medical condition, (3) parent read English sufficiently to complete questionnaires and consent, (4) parent was a legal and/or physical custodial guardian, and (5) parent and child did not have uncorrected hearing or vision impairments.

Procedure

At the study visit, parents provided written informed consent. The laboratory room was set up to approximate a living room and contained a 1-way mirror, couches, 3 books in boxes (2 tablet books and 1 print book), and video cameras.

Participants first completed a 5-minute, video-recorded free play with nondigital toys. They then completed a random, preassigned reading activity with an enhanced electronic book, a basic electronic book, and a print book occurring in counterbalanced order ( Fig 1). Figure 2 includes 1 example permutation. Books were placed in open boxes labeled 1 to 3 out of children's reach. Parents received instructions to start with the book in box 1, that they have "5 minutes to look at it," and to complete books sequentially as prompted.

Book Formats

Three Mercer Mayer "Little Critter" books ( Just Grandma and Me, All by Myself, and Just a Mess) were chosen because of their similar length, reading difficulty, and availability in all 3 formats. Print books were 8×8-inch softcovers. Basic electronic-book capabilities allowed for swiping to turn the pages and tapping illustrations to elicit the appearance of words but without autonarration or additional features, such as sound effects. Enhanced electronic books contained audiovisual hot spots: tapping illustrations would result in the appearance and narration of the word (eg, tapping a seagull picture resulted in the appearance and narration of the word "seagull") coupled with sound effects. Tapping other pictures or turning a page produced a sound effect (eg, tapping a dog would produce the sound of a dog panting, and turning the page to a beach produced sounds of ocean waves). Although autonarration of the story was disabled on both electronic-book formats, tapping and holding down an individual sentence in the enhanced electronic book would narrate that text, but this feature was only briefly used by 2 dyads. Basic and enhanced electronic books were preloaded on a 10-inch Samsung Galaxy tablet computer, which contained no other applications. Parents received instruction to select "read it myself" such that the electronic book was not narrating the book text.

Survey Measures

Parents completed surveys regarding covariates for potential inclusion in statistical models, including demographic information (parent age, sex, educational attainment, household income, race and/or ethnicity, relationship to child, and marital status; child's age, sex, ethnicity, and prematurity) and standardized measures of child language, social-emotional development, and digital media-use practices.

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory (CDI) short form assessed toddler language development. This 100-word validated and reliable vocabulary checklist generated a percentile score from total words produced and accounted for age.

The Brief Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (BITSEA) is a validated and reliable 42-item questionnaire that screens for child social-emotional problems. Parents rated items on a 3-point Likert scale generating the Problem and Competence subscales (Cronbach α = 0.68 and 0.58, respectively).

Standardized questions assessed the frequency of home child digital media use (including tablet, smartphone, and electronic-book usage) and parental mediation strategies (instructive, restrictive, and coviewing).

Coding Parent-Toddler Verbal Interactions

We developed a verbal coding scheme based on previous literature on dialogic reading and shared electronic-book reading. For each 10-second interval, researchers coded 1 for a specific verbalization occurring or 0 for not occurring; interval verbalization counts were summed within each 5-minute book condition. Verbalization categories were not mutually exclusive; parents and children could have >1 type per 10-second interval, although each sentence was only coded in 1 category. Please see the coding definitions in Tables 1 and 2 for parent and child verbalizations. Parent and child utterances were independently summed to calculate total verbalizations. Undergraduate students blinded to the hypothesis coded to reliability with Cohen's κ of at least 0.70.

Coding Parent-Toddler Nonverbal Interactions

We developed 2 global coding schemes based on existing literature on shared print-book reading to assess parent-toddler nonverbal interactions: shared positive affect and collaborative book-reading experience. ⁻ Codes were applied on the basis of the full 5 minutes per book condition on a scale of 1 to 5 ( Table 3). The 5-minute free-play session was also coded for shared positive affect and examined as a potential covariate representing baseline parent-child interaction quality.

Analysis

We conducted Poisson regressions using Proc Genmod to compare each verbal outcome by book format, adjusting for total elapsed time, given the occasional variation in reading duration. Proc Mixed was used to compare differences in positive affect and collaborative book reading by book format. All models included a repeated measures statement to allow for within-subjects comparison of verbal and nonverbal outcomes by book-format condition. Although the counterbalanced design accounted for between-subjects variance in factors known to influence book-reading behaviors, such as sociodemographic characteristics, we included covariates in final models with P < .05 to improve model fit (eg, order of book presentation, parent income, race and/or ethnicity, child sex, CDI or BITSEA score, and home media practices). A sensitivity analysis excluding 1 participant who cried during the entirety of 1 book-reading condition did not reveal differences; therefore, all participants were included. All analyses were completed in SAS 9.4 (SAS Institute, Inc, Cary, NC).

Results

As shown in Table 4, children were 29.2 months old, and parents were 33.5 years old. Of the parents, 81% were mothers, 76% had a 4-year college degree or more, and 89% were married. Of the children, 54% were boys, 57% were non-Hispanic white, 16% were non-Hispanic African American, and 27% were of other race and/or ethnicity.

Figure 3 shows the number of intervals containing each type of parent verbalization. Parent dialogic verbalizations were greater with print (11.9 intervals [SE = 1.1]) versus either enhanced electronic (6.2 intervals [SE = 0.7]; P < .001) or basic electronic books (8.3 intervals [SE = 0.9]; P < .001). Parent nondialogic verbalizations were greater with print (17.7 [SE = 0.7]) versus basic electronic books (15.7 [SE = 0.8]; P = .008). Parents read the book text more with print (14.3 [SE = 1.0]; P = .003) or basic electronic (14.4 [SE = 1.1]; P < .001) compared with enhanced electronic books (10.6 [SE = 0.9]). Parents made fewer format-related and negative format-related directives when engaging over print books versus enhanced or basic electronic books ( Fig 3). Parents had more total verbalizations when interacting over print books (29.5 [SE = 0.2]) versus enhanced electronic books (28.1 [SE = 0.4]; P = .003) and more so over basic electronic books (29.3 [SE = 0.3]; P = .005) versus enhanced electronic books.

Figure 4 includes the number of intervals containing each type of toddler verbalization. Toddlers' book-content verbalizations were greater with print (15.0 [SE = 1.2]) versus either enhanced electronic (11.5 [SE = 0.9]; P < .001) or basic electronic books (12.5 [SE = 1.1]; P = .005). Toddlers had no differences in negative verbalizations across all formats but had more off-task verbalizations with print (2.3 [SE = 0.3]) versus enhanced electronic books (1.3 [SE = 0.3]; P = .007). Total toddler verbalizations were greater with print (18.8 [SE = 1.1]) versus either enhanced electronic (13.8 [SE = 0.9]; P < .001) or basic electronic books (15.3 [SE = 1.0]; P < .001).

Figure 5 includes nonverbal outcomes by book format. Shared positive affect was similar across all book formats. Dyads' collaborative book-reading scores were higher with print (3.1 [SE = 0.2]) versus either enhanced electronic (2.7 [SE = 0.2]; P = .004) or basic electronic books (2.8 [SE = 0.2]; P = .02).

Discussion

Developmental benefits of shared book reading have been attributed to the quality of parent-child interactions occurring around books, particularly in prereaders such as toddlers, who rely heavily on parents to understand story content. These interactions include the quantity of words spoken, how parents tailor content to children's experiences to support learning, and asking open-ended questions to promote child expressive language., Our findings suggest that high-quality dialogic practices are less common, and parents and toddlers speak less overall and in a less collaborative manner, when reading electronic books compared with print. Parents read the text less in enhanced electronic books, making more format-related comments and negative directives when reading electronic books.

Similar to previous studies in preschoolers, we found that electronic-book enhancements were likely interfering with parents' ability to engage in dialogic reading. Dialogic, parent-guided conversation promotes toddler expressive-language development and supports preliteracy skills, which are crucial for independent reading, far more than reading only text or making simple (nondialogic) comments, although these are also important. Parents strengthen their children's ability to acquire knowledge by relating new content to their children's lived experiences., There is a large body of literature showing that this type of adult scaffolding is especially important for toddlers to transfer information from digital media to the real world because toddlers in particular learn and retain novel information better from in-person interactions than from digital media. ⁻,,, However, such practices occurred less frequently with electronic books, which raises the question of whether electronic books have lower educational potential for toddlers.

Parents also asked fewer simple questions, commented about the storyline less, and read less during electronic-book conditions compared with print. These behaviors are important because they promote child receptive language by exposing children to novel vocabulary and more complex syntax than conversations occurring during daily activities.

Even interactions over basic electronic books contained fewer dialogic and total parent verbalizations compared with print, suggesting that affordances of the tablet (and not only the interactive design) may be influencing parents' behavior. Parents and children may conceptualize tablets as being individually used rather than shared objects. Indeed, 1 study revealed that children tend to create solitary spaces when engaging in tablet play compared with traditional toy play, leaving less space for their parents to coview and ignoring parent bids for attention. Similarly, parents reported a sense of pride and relief when their children independently engaged with a tablet device without help, and we acknowledge that this independence may be perceived as a potential benefit of electronic books. We hypothesize that the tablet itself may reduce opportunities for parent-child interactions during book reading.

Children changed their behavior as a function of book format, verbalizing more when reading the print book. This finding may be related to greater parent dialogic reading with print books versus electronic books, which provides positive reinforcement for toddler speech. Children's tendency to become occupied in repeated tapping or swiping on electronic books may also have supplanted speech production. Repetitive tapping and swiping may not constitute sufficient engagement to learn new concepts because it is thought to represent cause-and-effect play rather than "minds-on" activity. True meaningful engagement (active involvement occurring in a rich social context without distractions) fosters the most effective learning from media. Previous research in preschoolers supports this concept because distracting digital enhancements interfere with parent scaffolding, which leads to reduced child story comprehension and fewer child verbalizations., Opportunities to practice expressive language, such as those occurring with print books, are important because early language skills strongly predict future linguistic and cognitive aptitude in school.

The high frequency of format-related verbalizations (eg, directing the child to turn the page) observed during both electronic-book conditions may displace book-related verbal exchanges that dyads engaged in with print books. This is consistent with previous research: although parents showed the same number of verbal exchanges with preschoolers around electronic versus print books, exchanges tended to be related to technology rather than story content. It is possible that parents made more format-related verbalizations to orient their children to a new experience because electronic books were novel to 62% of the children in this sample; however, 79% had previously played with tablets and/or mobile devices. The negative and directive nature of parent format-related verbalizations may indicate a need for more behavioral management with electronic books compared with print.

Parents and children had more off-task verbalizations with the print book versus electronic book, which is similar to previous studies in preschoolers. This could be related to persuasive tablet-design features, which may command parent and child attention, at the expense of attending to one another, an effect that is known to occur with traditional screen media, such as television. ⁻ It is challenging to discern whether this attentional focus resulted in improved learning because toddler reading comprehension is difficult to assess. However, as mentioned above, toddlers may be engaged in ways that may be less educationally enriching when reading electronic compared with print books.

Our study was the first to examine nonverbal aspects of electronic-book reading in toddlers both through shared positive affect and collaborative book reading. These nonverbal behaviors during reading are important because they foster a love of reading and promote secure parent-child attachment, which has been implicated in resilience, physical health, and quality of future relationships. Comparable to previous studies in preschoolers, dyads with high shared positive affect consistently showed this across all formats, suggesting that electronic books may be equally enjoyable for dyads despite other limitations. The quality of collaborative reading was likely lower for electronic books because observationally, parents and toddlers frequently sat separately, could not easily view the book, or appeared to struggle for tablet possession. These behaviors during tablet-based play are documented in recent work and merit further study. Our results may explain previous findings that parents report preferring shared reading over print versus electronic books with toddlers.

Limitations include the small sample size from 1 geographic area, the use of only 1 type of book-reading application (which limits generalizability), and that the age range of our study sample precluded assessment of reading comprehension. Strengths include experimental methodology, the use of commercially available books available in 3 formats, a diverse sample, and the within-subjects design, which allowed for direct comparison of the reading experience within each dyad. Future studies should consider other facets of nonverbal interactions or moderating effects of dyad characteristics, such as parent literacy level, child temperament, or home media-use practices. Replication of this study by using different applications (this application had a particular set of enhancements) in other contexts, such as home or school settings, is necessary. Although parent-child interactions are critical for toddler learning, directly examining toddler learning from print versus electronic books is another important area for future work.

Conclusions

Given the decreased quantity of parent-child verbalizations and quality of interactions occurring with the electronic books that we studied, pediatricians may wish to recommend print books over electronic books with distracting features for parent-toddler shared reading. In considering affordances of electronic books that promote learning, software designers should limit irrelevant audiovisual enhancements for toddlers. Parents reading electronic books with toddlers should consider engaging as they would with print and minimize focus on elements of the technology itself.

Acknowledgments

We thank Rosa Ball, Ranya Alkhayyat, Joy Boakye, and Anastasia Pacifico for their diligent and wonderful work on this study.

Footnotes

Accepted December 10, 2018.

Address correspondence to Tiffany G. Munzer, MD, Department of Pediatrics, University of Michigan Medical School, 300 N. Ingalls St, 1024 NW, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-5406. E-mail: chungti{at}med.umich.edu

FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: Dr Radesky is paid to write articles for PBS Parents and is on the board of directors and consults for Melissa and Doug; the other authors have indicated they have no financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose.

FUNDING: Funded by the 2017 Academic Pediatric Association Reach Out and Read Young Investigator Award (principal investigator: Dr Radesky), which made it possible to conceptualize, implement, collect, and analyze data and write this article, and supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (grant 5T32HD079350-02), which made it possible to conceptualize and write this article. Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Dr Radesky is paid to write articles for PBS Parents and is on the board of directors and consults for Melissa and Doug; the other authors have indicated they have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

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Differences in Parent-Toddler Interactions With Electronic Versus Print Books

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Video Abstract OBJECTIVES: Previous research has documented less dialogic interaction between parents and preschoolers during electronic-book reading versus print. Parent-toddler interactions around commercially available tablet-based books have not been described. We examined parent-toddler verbal and nonverbal interactions when reading electronic versus print books.

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varoom mag article: professor astrocat made into and app

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varoom mag article: professor astrocat made into and app

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another example of book trailer - more basic just pans books illustrations 

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another example of book trailer - more basic just pans books illustrations 

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I CAN HELP, written by Reem Faruqi and illustrated by Mikela Prevost

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ongoing study: #WEARETOGETHER: CHILDREN READING DURING LOCKDOWN FOCUS OF ONGOING STUDY

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ongoing study: #WEARETOGETHER: CHILDREN READING DURING LOCKDOWN FOCUS OF ONGOING STUDY

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Parents are being asked how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected how their primary children are reading at home in a study being run by the University of Re ading.

The project is looking at how change s in educational circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic on reading skills and motivation for reading of primary school aged children in the UK and Ireland.

The study is currently recruiting parents and carers to fill out an online survey about their experiences of lockdown reading with their kids, looking at how schools are promoting reading at home differently during lockdown, and people taking part can get personalised feedback and advice.

Dr Anna Tsakalaki , Lecturer in Education at the University of Reading's Institute of Education is leading the study. Dr Tsakalaki said:

" We know that reading is one of the most important skills that is developed during early education as it sets a critical foundation for learning in the future. As the pandemic has caused major disruptions to the way that schools have been delivering learning, we wanted to find out about parents' and experiences of literacy promotion with their children.

"What has been interesting so far from participants and in discussions with others is that reading is seen as quite a narrow activity with children either having their heads in a book or being read to. The reality is that there are so many ways that and literacy are promoted in the home, from looking through a cookbook for the banana loaf recipe through to listening to a grandparent tell a story from their childhood.

"Ultimately, we want to get a really good picture of how reading activities are being promoted in the home and from educational settings supporting parents at this time, so that we can better understand and track the true impact of Covid-19 on the educational experienc es and outcomes of a generation of children."

Facebook users can also read more about the project at:

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Parents are being asked how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected how their primary children are reading at home in a study being run by the University of Re ading. The project is looking at how change s in educational circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic on reading skills and motivation for reading of primary school aged children in the UK and Ireland.

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Children and young people’s reading in 2020 before and during the COVID-19 lockdown

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Children and young people’s reading in 2020 before and during the COVID-19 lockdown

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although this is ages 9-18

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This report outlines findings from our tenth Annual Literacy Survey relating to children and young people's reading in 2020, in addition to findings from our survey of children and young people's reading during the COVID-19 lockdown.

58,346 children and young people aged 9 to 18 in the UK took part in our Annual Literacy Survey between January and March 2020, while 4,141 children and young people aged 8 to 18 in the UK took part in our survey during lockdown between May and early June 2020.

With special thanks to kind financial support from Puffin.

Key findings
Children are reading and enjoying reading more during lockdown

Children's enjoyment of reading has increased during lockdown (from 47.8% pre-lockdown to 55.9% post-lockdown), having reached a 15-year low before lockdown

More than a quarter (27.6%) of children and young people say they are enjoying reading more during lockdown

A third (34.5%) of children and young people say they are reading more during lockdown

Children have turned to adventure, comedy, fantasy and real life stories during lockdown and have found joy in discovering books they'd never read before

Children are reading more fiction (genres: adventure, funny books, realistic stories and magical/fantasy), song lyrics, news, non-fiction, etc. with a real uplift in reading on screen, compared with before lockdown

Almost 1 in 2 (46.3%) children said that they had read new books during lockdown and 1 in 7 (14.1%) had re-read books they have at home

Reading has also provided refuge in this difficult time, supporting children's mental wellbeing and enabling them to dream about the future

3 in 5 (59.3%) children and young people told us during lockdown that reading makes them feel better

3 in 10 (31.6%) said that reading helps them when they feel sad because they cannot see their family and friends

Reading is encouraging half of children (50.2%) to dream about the future

While the gender gap in children's reading has widened during lockdown, audiobooks may provide a route into reading for boys

Lockdown has increased the literacy engagement gap between boys and girls, with the gap in reading enjoyment widening from 2.3 percentage points at the beginning of 2020 to 11.5 percentage points during lockdown. The gender gap in daily reading also widened during lockdown, increasing from a 4.3 percentage point difference at the beginning of 2020 to a 7.4 percentage point difference during lockdown

Audiobooks might be a way to re-engage boys with stories, as this is the only format where more boys than girls said that they enjoy it more and are doing it more often.

Overall, slightly more boys than girls (25.0% vs. 22.4%) said they had listened to audiobooks more during lockdown than before

Audiobooks also appear to offer a way into literacy for boys, with 1 in 2 (51.1%) boys saying that listening to audiobooks has increased their interest in reading, and 2 in 5 (43.2%) saying that it has made them more interested in writing

However, the conditions of lockdown have meant that some children have faced greater barriers to reading
Some children and young people reported that a lack of access to books (with schools and libraries closed), a lack of quiet space at home and a lack of school/peer support had negatively affected their ability to read and their motivation to read for enjoyment

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Children and young people's reading in 2020 before and during the COVID-19 lockdown | National Literacy Trust

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This report outlines findings from our tenth Annual Literacy Survey relating to children and young people's reading in 2020, in addition to findings from our survey of children and young people's reading during the COVID-19 lockdown.

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Book: A Companion to Illustration: Art & Theory 

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Book: A Companion to Illustration: Art & Theory 

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The Symbiotic Dilemma of the Children’s Picture Book Maker in a Polymathic World by Karenanne Knight

p361 "Children now have available to them many forms of text. These have changed the ways in which young readers expect to read. This has changed the way they think, the ways they construct meaning. This is because many books now cannot be read by attention to writing alone." - it is the perfect synthesis of image and tex that create a powerful, high quality picture book

p.362 "As picture book makers, teachers, writers, and illustrators, I would suggest that the greatest demand is to imagine and create the what of the picture book, in terms of the fusion and multimodal element of the book, using the experiences of the child of today in order to allow them to enjoy and find value in the work we as designers, writers, illustrators, and child development officers create for them."

"The physicality of the book does, it seems, continue to drive up the popularity of children’s books for consumers. Why, for instance, have sales of the paper picture book risen over the last few years? Whilst digital books for children continue to grow, there seems to be a trend for the digital and paper picture book to grow in popularity side by side. However, as a retail product, the picture book as an artifact would seem to be maintaining its attractiveness to be read at home, whilst in schools there seems to be a stronger move toward the digital picture book, and some schools have been known to banish books in the classroom to a singular library."

p.363 "As graduates become publishers, heads of marketing and sales, are their outlooks on picture book audiences changing based on their experiences growing up and being educated in a digital age?"

p.373 children's preferences - "Watercolor paper that had a glossy enhancement upon publication in a portrait or square format was preferred. Tonal extremes, negative coloration, fluorescent or very pale colors were valued far, far less by the children."
they prefer printed books however the digital copies would allow personalisation as there was varied responses.

p.376 conclusion- "reading opens up a world of opportunities, and books are the foun- dation on which we can build learning; therefore reading should be a source of pleasure in itself, as well as an essential support for increasing the life chances of young people"

A Companion to Illustration : Art and Theory, edited by Alan Male, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mmu/detail.action?docID=5741995.

Created from mmu on 2021-10-04 21:29:07.

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social media stats- to back up opinion on rise of book trailers and e-books 

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social media stats- to back up opinion on rise of book trailers and e-books 

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https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media 4/10/2020

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The concept of a book trailer is not new. But much like QR codes have skyrocketed in use since the pandemic demanded everything become contactless, I believe we are about to witness the rise of book trailers.

And it's about time.

I've already started seeing book trailers pop up more and more. It's mostly been the work of traditional publishers-they never really stopped making them, particularly in the YA genre. If you are an avid reader, you've no doubt seen ads pop up for the latest release in your Instagram Stories or on your Facebook feed. But thanks to the four factors I've listed below, you're going to start seeing them a lot more often. You may even want your own!

1. The latest and greatest social media app is all about video.

I'm talking, of course, about TikTok. Whether you are on the app or not, it's hard to deny the effects it's had on the world. TikTokkers have supercharged social movements, helped propel songs to the top of the charts,

Much like Instagram has the #bookstagram community, TikTok has BookTok, and BookTokkers buy books. Recently, WA friend Kandi Steiner's TikTok went viral, and the five-year-old book showcased in that video made its way to the top fifteen of the whole Amazon Kindle store.

Now, her book trailer is a little less conventional than the kind of book trailer you might be thinking about, but the underlying principles are the same: use eye-catching visuals and captivating words to grab hold of your audience's attention, and they just might be called to action. Clearly, it pays to know a little something about creating videos.

2. Algorithms on all those other platforms like videos, too.

It's not just TikTok. Facebook and Instagram will both be leaning into video content in 2021. They already have with Stories, Instagram Reels, and even Facebook Watch. And viewers want more of it. Naturally, you will be rewarded for including video in your social media strategy.

Why is everyone hopping on the video bandwagon? Because all of these social media platforms want users to stay on the platform, so it makes sense that the social media algorithms reward content that makes people stay on the app longer with more eyeballs.

3. Book trailers can serve as your introduction to YouTube's users.

The second most visited website on all of the Internet-second only to Google-is YouTube. Like any platform, it has its subcultures and communities, and you can bet BookTube and AuthorTube not only exist, but thrive.

Not everyone has the bandwidth to make content and learn marketing strategies for more (if you're considering joining TikTok, two more) social media platforms. That's understandable. You should do what you have the time and energy for, as well as consider which platforms bring you genuine joy.

Still, YouTube's ubiquity and ease of use make it the perfect place to host your video content for sharing. YouTube videos can be embedded pretty much everywhere. This very blog embeds YouTube videos all the time, which you'll know if you've ever read one of the Motivational Minute blog posts.

4. They haven't caught on yet.

I have yet to see very much hullabaloo surrounding book trailers, have you? It seems we can all agree that video is increasingly more important to post, but not quite what that video ought to look like.

This will, of course, become clear with time. By then, videos about books will be everywhere. That's why I recommend you start creating that content now. Experiment. Mess it all up. Press all the buttons. Pay attention to what works for yourself and others, and what doesn't. As we've seen time and time again, the Internet rewards those who arrive at a trend early.

What do you think? Are book trailers primed for a meteoric rise in popularity?

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4 Reasons Why Book Trailers Will Explode in Popularity (+ How to Make Your Own) - Writer's Atelier

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The concept of a book trailer is not new. But much like QR codes have skyrocketed in use since the pandemic demanded everything become contactless, I believe we are about to witness the rise of book trailers. And it's about time. I've already started seeing book trailers pop up more and more.

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"Though the book trailer has been around for nearly a decade, the form has not really gained a lot of traction. But readers are experiencing novels in, well, novel ways. As sales in e-books continue to rise and printed book sales inversely decline, we will likely see a resurgence in the form. The trailer will especially be a key component in hooking younger readers."

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The book trailer is just beginning to find its voice. As the name suggests, the book trailer is a video that promotes a book, much as a movie trailer generates hype for its feature film. Two years ago, a clip was released for Thomas Pynchon's eagerly awaited Inherent Vice. In the trailer, notably voiced by the reclusive author himself, shaky video footage of barren California beaches and a soundtrack reminiscent of Pink Floyd gives the narration a nostalgic feel. At the end, Pynchon all but tells you to stop watching: Maybe you'll just want to read the book, before balking at its retail price.

Or take the recent trailer supporting Ben Marcus' newest release, The Flame Alphabet. If you didn't know the trailer was pushing a book, you might think the unsettling animation was for Contagion. The video is eerily effective, and will no doubt help in digital as well as physical sales of the book. The use of voiceover, regarded as something of a narrative crutch in feature films, is at home here.

Marcus met Erin Cosgrove, the animator of his book trailer, through Creative Capital, an organization that funds artists. Though he thinks it sad that books now need a visual component to make them more appealing, he at least advocates for something more artistic. It's become clear that advertorials with large text floating through the sky don't work, he says. A trailer is more of an oblique sidecar in that it is not explicit praise.

The Flame Alphabet shows there is a chance to create something that can stand as its own artistic work.

Though the book trailer has been around for nearly a decade, the form has not really gained a lot of traction. But readers are experiencing novels in, well, novel ways. As sales in e-books continue to rise and printed book sales inversely decline, we will likely see a resurgence in the form. The trailer will especially be a key component in hooking younger readers.

Cary Murnion, who runs the creative agency Honest, approaches trailers from a cinematic standpoint. We think trailers work the same way as in the movies: We don't want to spell out the narrative, but give the reader a sense of the narrative and themes of the book.

Murnion's team is responsible for a host of trailers, including a series for Michael Crichton's novel Next and Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff, and recently a video game-inspired clip for Ready Player One.

"Sometimes we do a series of trailers, where each one is almost a puzzle piece to the book," Murnion said. "We don't give away too much; we just want the viewer to get the feeling of the book."

Jeff Yamaguchi of Knopf Doubleday, which produced The Flame Alphabet trailer, worked with Murnion on the Next campaign in 2006 when YouTube was just starting to take off.

"The way the Web works, it's very fast-moving. Video is a nice way to work into that fray. I think what will evolve is having a lot of video," Yamaguchi said. "You can't just do one. With Ben Marcus, we have that one awesome video [produced by Erin Cosgrove.] But you can't ask her to make four more of those. So we also have an interview with Ben and we filmed him giving him some writing advice."

Yamaguchi is talking about Knopf's Writers on Writing series. Though these videos are not trailers, they're more media that fuels the publisher to push the novel, allowing for a greater connection with readers, a term he calls feeding the beast.

Professional video editors could soon add publishing editors to their list of clients as they're asked to cut trailers for books much as they are for feature films. Robert Ludlum in the style of Jerry Bruckheimer, a Stephen King book cut like Hostel. What would a Don Delillo trailer be like? Jeffrey Eugenides? Murakami? Capturing the voices of these authors in a video might seem like a fool's errand, and it doesn't mean publishers won't try, but it is wise to tread carefully.

With books being turned into movies, a lot of them already have a cinematic feel, so they lend themselves to a trailer, Murnion says. But one of our jobs is not to force anything. We read the book first always, and we advise the client on the best way to approach the trailer, or just how to launch the book. It has to fit with the content.

The relationship between books and movies has existed as long as film has, and is never more evident than when there is a tie-in, as in last year's Ryan Gosling vehicle Drive. A book cover tempts the casual browser in a store, but video, a medium built for the Internet, will entice the online shopper.

Authors and publishers have started to realize that video is a pretty powerful promotional tool. Authors aren't selling out, they're entering the playing field. Much like the very experience of reading a book and watching its film adaptation are wholly different, the literary trailer is a means of generating enthusiasm for the book without usurping it.

Murnion is optimistic, "I think trailers will just get better. The audience we attract, the more used to trailers they are, the more chances we can take to push the creative."

Yamaguchi adds, "Something I'm hopeful for, people see it less as commercials, and more as a creative short film. That's what people want to see, that's the kind of thing that gets shared. And the medium of video online, there's no shortage of it, but boy is there a huge opportunity to do amazing stuff."

Tristan Kneschke is a freelance editor and colorist who operates Exit Editorial.

Watch the book trailer for The Flame Alphabet below:

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The book trailer is just beginning to find its voice. As the name suggests, the book trailer is a video that promotes a book, much as a movie trailer generates hype for its feature film. Two years ago, a clip was released for Thomas Pynchon's eagerly awaited Inherent Vice.

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book: The crafty animator : handmade, craft-based animation and cultural value 2019

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book: The crafty animator : handmade, craft-based animation and cultural value 2019

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features a lot on Charlie and Lola

"part of the appeal of children's animated television, Moseley argues, is the "aesthetics of child play" being evoked"

citation:
Ruddell, C. and Ward, P. (2019) The crafty animator : handmade, craft-based animation and cultural value. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (Palgrave Animation). Available at: INSERT-MISSING-URL (Accessed: October 2, 2021).

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David McKee, creator and animator

The BBC asked if I would make something for its Watch With Mother series. They dropped that name later, but for me it was important: it made you conscious the audience wasn't just children. I showed them the first Mr Benn book I'd written and they requested 13 stories. When they asked how it would be animated, I just said: "I'll ask somebody." It was complete innocence.

Too much animation is a mistake when you're storytelling. It's often a distraction. So Mr Benn largely relied on simple camera movements - stills, pans and zooms across detailed drawings I made. For things like walking, though, we needed proper movement, but I wasn't subtle enough. The result looks like something from Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.

I set it in my street in Putney, London, but changed Festing Road to Festive Road, because Festing sounded too much like festering. The fancy-dress shop Mr Benn visits was based on a dusty junk shop in Plymouth. I went into it once, to ask about something in the window, and the owner really did appear "as if by magic", as the narrator in the series says. He wasn't interested in selling anything. I thought: "This must be a front for something."

'I set it in my own street' ... Mr Benn on Festive Road. Photograph: David McKee/Clive Juster & Associates

I wanted Mr Benn to be Mr Everybody. Bowler hats were more common in the early 1970s. There was a respectability to them, plus Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy are favourites of mine. Mr Benn went off on adventures according to whatever costume he tried on. I was heavily influenced by fables, because of their apparent simplicity. I like stories with a moral, that have a reason for being there - I don't like a character to wake up and realise it was all a dream. That's why I introduced the souvenir that Mr Benn always takes back with him, to say that it really did happen.

I'm a believer in that kind of magic. I was brought up in south Devon. When a horse had ringworm, you didn't take it to the vet, you went to an old lady who charmed it. The guy across the road from us was bald, he went to her and grew a fantastic head of hair. My mother also had a sort of telepathy. Once the phone rang and she leapt up and said: "Oh my God, it's my brother Bill." It was news that he had a burst appendix.

Telepathic mum ... David McKee. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

When the series was first screened, my parents didn't have a TV. They'd go to a furniture shop and watch Mr Benn there. Afterwards, they'd tell staff: "We needed to watch that, because our son made it."

Ray Brooks, voice of Mr Benn

David was quite particular, he would even make me "pronounce" ellipses. When I wrote my autobiography, I said I'd like a cartoon of me and Mr Benn on the cover, holding pints of beer. There was a terrible pause and he said: "Mr Benn only drinks halves." But David's a very nice man. When he sends letters, he rather foolishly draws cartoons on the envelope. People end up selling them on eBay.

I was asked to do other cartoons because of Mr Benn - including Rupert the Bear, which was the worst thing I've ever done. I used to have a couple of pints before recording it, to numb my brain for his terrible rhymes. If you see an old Rupert book in a charity shop, you can be sure no kid has touched it. He's such a stupid little character.

They still love Mr Benn, though. The episodes were repeated twice a year for 21 years and sold shedloads of videos and DVDs. Grandmas come up to me and say their grandchildren are fed up with today's cartoons, but they love the simplicity of Mr Benn, the fact that he's very moral, always sorting out people's problems - including dragons.

A bunch of Welsh rugby supporters once came up to me in a pub and said: "You're Mr Benn, aren't you? We're having a debate: what number house did he live in?" Very strange.

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The BBC asked if I would make something for its Watch With Mother series. They dropped that name later, but for me it was important: it made you conscious the audience wasn't just children. I showed them the first Mr Benn book I'd written and they requested 13 stories.

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You might not recognise the name David McKee, but you are probably familiar with one of his creations.

He is the man who created Mr Benn.

The character inspired a cartoon, which was recently voted one of the most-loved children's television programmes of all time.

A new art exhibition featuring David McKee's work has just opened in London.

BBC Breakfast's Tim Muffett went to meet him.

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You might not recognise the name David McKee, but you are probably familiar with one of his creations. He is the man who created Mr Benn. The character inspired a cartoon, which was recently voted one of the most-loved children's television programmes of all time.

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Mr Benn is an ordinary man who has extraordinary adventures. In this, the first ever Mr Benn story, he swaps his bowler hat and black suit for a red suit of armour and makes friends with a dragon.

First published in 1967, Mr Benn - Red Knight is one of a series of stories by author and illustrator David McKee that inspired the legendary Mr Benn TV series. McKee's original artwork brings the glories of a golden age of children's book illustration and story-telling to a new generation.

David McKee is the author and illustrator of over 100 children's books and the creator of several memorable characters besides Mr Benn, including Elmer the Patchwork Elephant and King Rollo.

Suitable for ages 5+

Delivery & returns

UK - 1-2 weeks

European Union - 2-4 weeks

For orders under £60:

UK - £3.60 per order

Refunds & returns

Please contact our customer service team within 45 days if you need to return anything from your order. We will be happy to offer you a full refund, replacement or exchange on any items excluding custom prints, face coverings and pierced earrings.

Unfortunately, after 14 working days we cannot refund any delivery charges or cover the cost of returning the item. You can contact our customer service team by email at: shop.online@tate.org.uk or by phone on +44 (0)20 7887 8888 (Monday - Friday, 9.45-18.00).

Here's more information on refunds & returns.

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Mr Benn is an ordinary man who has extraordinary adventures. In this, the first ever Mr Benn story, he swaps his bowler hat and black suit for a red suit of armour and makes friends with a dragon.

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Julia Donaldson makes record £10m sales five years in a row

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Julia Donaldson makes record £10m sales five years in a row

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the five years following the release of the animation. Orginal book was published in 1999

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A dancing chorus of giants and snails, witches and Gruffalos have propelled Julia Donaldson into uncharted territory, as the former children's laureate becomes the first author to record UK sales of more than £10m for five consecutive years.

According to the Bookseller, Donaldson's 2014 sales topped £10m in the UK last week, ahead of publishing titans such as JK Rowling and Dan Brown, becoming "the only author to record five years in a row of eight-digit revenue since [book sales monitor Nielsen] BookScan records began".

Rowling topped £10m for four years in a row, between 2000 and 2003, while Brown, like Jamie Oliver, has managed three consecutive years. Thriller writer James Patterson, Twilight creator Stephenie Meyer and the late Girl with the Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson have made more than £10m in a year twice.

"Julia's glorious storytelling has delighted children and adults for over 20 years," said Donaldson's editor Alison Green, publisher at Scholastic's Alison Green Books, on learning of the news. "Children can't resist joining in with her perfect rhythm and rhyme, while Julia's collaborations, particularly with the wonderful Axel Scheffler, introduce them to a host of amazing worlds. Parents love the stories, too, as they stand the test of hundreds of bedtime readings, and her words inspire them to put on their best story performance."

Donaldson's first picture book was A Squash and a Squeeze, a story of a little old lady who "lived all by herself / With a table and chairs and a jug on the shelf", and who grumbles about not having enough room in her house. Published in 1993 and illustrated by Scheffler, it grew from a song she had written for children's television.

Her breakthrough came six years later when she teamed up with Scheffler for The Gruffalo, with Room on the Broom following in 2001. She served as children's laureate from 2011 to 2013, but has continued to publish at a rate of more than a book a year. Picture books published over the last five years have included Tabby McTat (2009), Zog (2010) and The Highway Rat (2011):

"Give me your buns and your biscuits!
Give me your chocolate éclairs!
For I am the Rat of the highway,
and the Rat Thief never shares!"

According to Nielsen, Donaldson has amassed lifetime sales of £91.2m in the UK, making her the fourth-bestselling writer ever, behind Rowling (£250.8m), Oliver (£146.5m) and Patterson (£119.1m). Brown is in fifth place - just - with £90.99m.

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Julia Donaldson makes record £10m sales five years in a row

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A dancing chorus of giants and snails, witches and Gruffalos have propelled Julia Donaldson into uncharted territory, as the former children's laureate becomes the first author to record UK sales of more than £10m for five consecutive years.

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Designed for Key Stage 1 (and useful also for older pupils who have SEN or English as a second language), the app enables students to:

watch key moments from The Gruffalo film,

record their voices over the top of the moving images by reading the subtitles from the original script or recording new narrative,

choose suitable soundtracks to enhance the mood of the scene, choose or record sound effects to bring the action to life,

name and save their creations to the app, and share their films in class by exporting them or connecting iPads to the whiteboard.

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Education charity Into Film announces the release of an innovative new, literacy focused app and teaching resource Into Film Storymaker: The Gruffalo Edition.

The exciting new, Key Stage 1 app enables students to develop their reading, writing, speaking, listening and technical skills by interacting with popular fictional character The Gruffalo, created by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, as never before. Previewing on the Into Film Stand (B225) at BETT and developed by the charity in partnership with production company Magic Light Pictures, the app invites students to think about The Gruffalo film in a totally different way. Users can record their own dialogue, music and sound effects for a number of selected clips to create their own special version of the award-winning film. This is the first time it has been possible for students to apply their creative skills to an actual film and is currently also the only app to be supported by an extensive teaching resource.

Designed for Key Stage 1 (and useful also for older pupils who have SEN or English as a second language), the app enables students to:

watch key moments from The Gruffalo film,

record their voices over the top of the moving images by reading the subtitles from the original script or recording new narrative,

choose suitable soundtracks to enhance the mood of the scene, choose or record sound effects to bring the action to life,

name and save their creations to the app, and

share their films in class by exporting them or connecting iPads to the whiteboard.

It can be downloaded from the app store and its functionality accessed by any school, college or youth organisation which runs a free film club with Into Film, an education charity supported by the BFI with Lottery Funding. To set up an Into Film Club or download the associated resource visit www.intofilm.org

Teachers who have trialled the app welcome its potential to engage young people and boost literacy:

"Definitely say there is lots in there education wise - speaking and listening. Play is such an important part of learning at this age. Some students find it hard to articulate themselves so giving them the chance to have several goes at reading or saying something in their own time like this was valuable to them." Russell Hardy - Bookwell Primary School
"App was very good for Oracy skills and storytelling skills. There is loads we can do with this."
Louise Major, Laugharne School, Carmarthenshire

Into Film is a UK-wide education charity, supported by the BFI with Lottery funding, which puts film at the heart of children and young people's learning and personal development. It offers numerous opportunities for teaching and learning through film including: free film clubs offering access to a diverse catalogue of over 3500 films, dynamic curriculum linked and enrichment resources, guidance for filmmaking and film reviewing, training and CPD for teachers, and a free, education-focused annual Into Film Festival from 5-19 year-olds which is the world's largest youth film festival.

For information about Into Film, download resources or set up a free film club visit www.intofilm.org or call 0207 288 4520.

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INTO FILM AND THE GRUFFALO BRING LITERACY TO LIFE WITH NEW, INTERACTIVE APP AND TEACHING RESOURCE

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Education charity Into Film announces the release of an innovative new, literacy focused app and teaching resource Into Film Storymaker: The Gruffalo Edition. The exciting new, Key Stage 1 app enables students to develop their reading, writing, speaking, listening and technical skills by interacting with popular fictional character The Gruffalo, created by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, as never before.

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example of picture book-animation adaptation: Charlie and Lola

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example of picture book-animation adaptation: Charlie and Lola

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Charlie and Lola is a multi award winning cut out photomontage celaction 2D animation series aimed at a pre-school audience. It is adapted from the award winning children's books written and illustrated by Lauren Child.

In each episode Charlie and Lola deal with issues that they as young children, encounter everyday. These little issues spiral into a succession of imaginative games, role plays and flights of fancy, normally invented by Charlie to coax his spirited little sister Lola round to seeing things in a more reasoned way.

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Charlie and Lola is a multi award winning cut out photomontage celaction 2D animation series aimed at a pre-school audience. It is adapted from the award winning children's books written and illustrated by Lauren Child. In each episode Charlie and Lola deal with issues that they as young children, encounter everyday.

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example of picturebook-animation adaptation: The Snowman 

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example of picturebook-animation adaptation: The Snowman 

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I wish I could be a proper writer, having to do only the words. Proper writers can start at the beginning, go on till they get to the end, then stop and hand it in. No drawing and painting, no design, no jacket to do and, above all, no hand lettering. Luxury.

The proper writer needs no training in typography or book design and production, and has probably never even set foot in a printer's. The publisher will print a thin book or a fat book; he doesn't mind. With picture books you are limited to 32 pages, not 31 or 33 but 32 exactly. Occasionally you are allowed 40 pages if the publisher is feeling relaxed about money - ho ho.

It was this pressure of space that forced me into the labour-intensive botheration of strip cartoons. In 1972, while working on Father Christmas, I found I needed far more than the 32 pictures of the standard book, and more even than the 64 of two pictures per page. There was so much to go in that 10 or more pictures per page were needed, so leading straight into the bottomless abyss of strip cartooning. Ever since I've been trying to give it up. It's not a job for an old man.

In the book I'm working on now, The Puddleman, the little boy appears 81 times. Last week I decided he should be in Wellingtons not shoes. This meant rubbing out 162 shoes and drawing in 162 wellingtons. After this I decided he should be in shorts, not jeans, so 81 pairs of jeans...

In the mid-1970s, a Swiss publisher produced a miniature version of Father Christmas. The strip-cartoon frames were tiny - about 3 cms x 4 cms. I hadn't rea-lised till then that frames could be this small. So, in 1980, with When the Wind Blows, I chose the largest format I could find and combined it with these tiny frames, so getting more than 20 frames a page.

I hoped When the Wind Blows might strike a blow for the much-despised medium of strip cartoons. It showed that it could deal with a profoundly serious subject in a straightforward way and make a valid point. The book was discussed in the House of Commons, made into a radio play and there were theatre productions all over Europe. Strip cartoons do not have to be comic cuts or muscle-bound men in tights socking bad guys on the jaw.

Strip-cartoon books are a natural precursor of films, particularly animated films; a strip-cartoon book is a ready-made storyboard. The Snowman, When the Wind Blows and the Father Christmas books have all been made into animated films, and Fungus the Bogeyman is in production.

The one great advantage of strip cartoons is that you can tell the story without any narrative prose. Ethel & Ernest tells the story of my parents' married life from their meeting in 1928 to their deaths in 1971. It is almost a mini-biography and even contains social history yet there is not a word of narration, only speech bubbles. Readers and reviewers never mention this, which is good as it means they haven't noticed it and this shows it has worked. It is the thing I am most pleased about in these books.

I'd still like to give it up though.

· Raymond Briggs is one of 13 children's illustrators featured in the Magic Pencil exhibition at the British Library

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Raymond Briggs: Why I'd like to be a proper author

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I wish I could be a proper writer, having to do only the words. Proper writers can start at the beginning, go on till they get to the end, then stop and hand it in. No drawing and painting, no design, no jacket to do and, above all, no hand lettering.

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Audiobooks, literature, and sound studies 2011 (28/09)

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Audiobooks, literature, and sound studies 2011 (28/09)

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history of audiobook. this is not relevant to a picture book but still useful when looking into the history and development of books and technology

"the first recordings of unabridged novels were made in Britain and the United States in the 1930's" this was due to soldiers from the war returning home with injuries or visual impairments.

p.8 "the availability of talking books continued to improve along with developments in sound technology during the second half of the twentieth century. whereas the term "talking book" had emerged with government programs designed for blind readers in the 1930's, the term "audiobook" came into use during the 1970's with he use of audiocassettes as an alternative to records"

1994 -Audio Publishers Accosiation established the term “audiobook” as the industry standard.
by 2002, audiobooks had become available to download on the internet through digital formats such as MP3

citation: Rubery, M. (2011) Audiobooks, literature, and sound studies. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Available at: INSERT-MISSING-URL (Accessed: September 28, 2021).

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Article - QR codes for children's books and educational materials

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Article - QR codes for children's books and educational materials

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"Scanning a QR code linking to audio or a video can open this world to them. QR codes are also a cost-effective way of flipping social media from a study distraction into a study tool by making textbooks more dynamic and interesting."

10 reasons for putting QR codes in books.

1. Potential buyers browsing bookstores can instantly check out whether a book is the right choice for them by reading customer reviews and visiting the author's website. They can also access pricing information and research other books in the series.

2. Other books by the author or titles in the same genre can be suggested, triggering additional  book sales.

3. Using a QR code, readers can be brought to a page where they can leave reviews about the book and communicate with the author and other readers as well as post comments on social sites.

4. Providing a link to an interactive element or media attracts more people to reading, and helps them learn more.

5. A QR code can link to a book trailer.

6. Turn printed words into audio. Implementing a QR code on the inside cover of your books can come in handy so readers can choose whether to read or listen. A simple scan of the QR Code redirects them to a mobile page where they can listen to an excerpt from the book. They can listen to it and if they like what they hear, they can click the button on the mobile page which links to the full version of the audiobook. This way, your QR code provides your readers with additional value that comes with every book they purchase.

7. Provide your readers with excerpts. When putting up banners to promote your latest book, you can add a QR code which gives people easy access to the synopsis or excerpts of it. With their smartphones, your readers can scan the QR code and read a few pages to get them interested to purchase it. And with every QR code, you can provide a link to where they can purchase the book online if they want to finish reading the entire book.

8. With a QR code books can be purchased directly from publishing houses and instantly downloaded to mobile devices.

9. Boost your sales with a QR codes that when scanned provides a coupon.

10. QR codes have the power to build the brand and marketing potential of both authors and publishing houses.

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QR codes let readers instantly enter the world of the author, experience interactive content and related media, discover related books, or link to Amazon or an independent bookstore for further reading purchases.

QR codes have the potential to turn reading into a more interactive experience. All the reader needs is a smartphone or mobile device to scan the QR code and they can unlock windows to world beyond the printed page.

Which books suit QR codes?

QR codes for books are easy to design and can be used across a variety of books from textbooks and instruction manuals to cook books and children's stories. They are particularly successful as a marketing or branding tool for self-publishing authors. Guidebooks to show amusement and historical attractions or luxurious coffee table books are opportunities to use QR codes as well. A good example is Usborne Publishing.

Usborne has been making children's books for over 40 years. Founded in 1973, Usborne is the largest and most successful independent children's publisher in the UK. Usborne books are available around the world, both in English and in over 100 different languages. As a company Usborne is constantly innovating, looking for new ways to engage children with books and reading. The latest edition of the Usborne Science Encyclopedia has 180 QR codes printed on the pages of the book. The QR codes provide instant access via a mobile phone or tablet to websites with video clips of experiments, animals in their habitats and animated lessons. WATCH THE USBORNE VIDEO.

10 reasons for putting QR codes in books.

1. Potential buyers browsing bookstores can instantly check out whether a book is the right choice for them by reading customer reviews and visiting the author's website. They can also access pricing information and research other books in the series.

2. Other books by the author or titles in the same genre can be suggested, triggering additional book sales.

3. Using a QR code, readers can be brought to a page where they can leave reviews about the book and communicate with the author and other readers as well as post comments on social sites.

4. Providing a link to an interactive element or media attracts more people to reading, and helps them learn more.

5. A QR code can link to a book trailer.

6. Turn printed words into audio. Implementing a QR code on the inside cover of your books can come in handy so readers can choose whether to read or listen. A simple scan of the QR Code redirects them to a mobile page where they can listen to an excerpt from the book. They can listen to it and if they like what they hear, they can click the button on the mobile page which links to the full version of the audiobook. This way, your QR code provides your readers with additional value that comes with every book they purchase.

7. Provide your readers with excerpts. When putting up banners to promote your latest book, you can add a QR code which gives people easy access to the synopsis or excerpts of it. With their smartphones, your readers can scan the QR code and read a few pages to get them interested to purchase it. And with every QR code, you can provide a link to where they can purchase the book online if they want to finish reading the entire book.

8. With a QR code books can be purchased directly from publishing houses and instantly downloaded to mobile devices.

9. Boost your sales with a QR codes that when scanned provides a coupon.

10. QR codes have the power to build the brand and marketing potential of both authors and publishing houses.

The further potential of QR codes on books.

Children love picture books and they love being read to. What could be better than their favorite author reading their favorite book to them? Scanning a QR code linking to audio or a video can open this world to them. QR codes are also a cost-effective way of flipping social media from a study distraction into a study tool by making textbooks more dynamic and interesting. QR codes can bring everything from school libraries and study rooms to worksheets and homework to life.

Create interactive sheet music with QR codes.

In just a few steps musicians can benefit from applying QR codes to tag their printed sheet music. The QR codes enrich the score they are studying by linking it to relevant online information, such as recorded performances and background information.

Source: https://cleverclogs.org/2011/07/creating-interactive-sheet-music-with-youtube-and-delivr-qr-codes.html

How to design a great QR code for books?

A lot of thought and effort goes into the design of book content and every book cover. A successful QR code needs to fit neatly into this overall concept without detracting from it. While crisp black and white codes always stand out clearly, bringing color to them allows them to work with the book's design. Be sure to add a a call-to-action to tell the reader what will happen when the code is scanned. For example, "Scan this QR code to enter the world of ...".

Printing QR codes onto books.

The high-gloss finish of many books can create light reflection and distortion so careful thought needs to go into the positioning of QR codes on their covers. A good idea is to link it to the book's blurb, either on the back cover or the inside flap. Loose-leaf covers do get damaged or lost so it makes sense to also have the Code within the book itself.

CityStory book project, Greenville: Imprints of a City. Sustainable storytelling that goes beyond the page.

This artfully designed coffee table book tells the story of Greenville through words and images, presented in black and silver ink with QR codes linking to videos and web pages to enhance the experience. More than just a history of the city, the book focuses on the modern city that Greenville has become, and narrates the story of today's Greenville, with its people, places and personality. CityStory selected Delivr to power the QR codes used throughout the book to bring stories to life.

Need a QR code for your book?

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What Are the Uses of QR Codes for Books & Educational Materials?

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QR codes let readers instantly enter the world of the author, experience interactive content and related media, discover related books, or link to Amazon or an independent bookstore for further reading purchases. QR codes have the potential to turn reading into a more interactive experience.

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A technological area to develop within the industry - for the visually impaired (2015) 27/09

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A technological area to develop within the industry - for the visually impaired (2015) 27/09

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"eReaders have also been a game changer for me when it comes to accessing books. I have a Kindle and this makes reading a lot easier because there is a backlight, allowing for much better print contrast, as well as the ability to make the print a variety of different sizes. The lighting and contrast settings also solve the issue of being able to read in the dark – I used to only be able to read under very bright lights in these conditions.
However, eReaders are still inaccessible to those with no sight at all and so the same issues with waiting time still exist for them, although waiting times have decreased dramatically for audiobooks with the help of downloads. It would be good if a voice activated software was put onto eReaders so that they were accessible to people who do not have enough vision to read print of any size."

The World Health Organization (2017) estimates that: 19 million children under the age of 15 have a visual impairment.

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Why books need to be made more accessible for visually impaired people

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As a visually impaired person, Maya Haynes had to wait six months for a large print copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - and when it came it was more of a doorstop than a book!

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Parent–Child Joint Reading in Traditional and Electronic Formats (2014) 27/09

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Parent–Child Joint Reading in Traditional and Electronic Formats (2014) 27/09

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"While Oborne and Holton (1988) did find some small differences between print and screen media in terms of user preference, they ultimately concluded that there was no difference between print and screen media in terms of reading speed and comprehension, even after manipulating background color." - although this is possibly outdated with the technological advances that have occurred since 1988

"Furthermore, as suggested by AIME (Solomon, 1981), children’s lowered comprehension may be affected by their perception of the iPad as easy to use or meant only for play." in reference to Solomon's article Television is ‘‘easy’’ and print is ‘‘tough’

citation - Krcmar, Marina & Cingel, Drew. (2014). Parent–Child Joint Reading in Traditional and Electronic Formats. Media Psychology. 17. 10.1080/15213269.2013.840243.

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Academic Article: Screens, Apps, and Digital Books for Young Children: The Promise of Multimedia 2020 27/09

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Academic Article: Screens, Apps, and Digital Books for Young Children: The Promise of Multimedia 2020 27/09

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"Thirty years into the digital era, it is now quite clear that apps, digital books, and video streaming services are game changers in the young child’s learning environment. Traditionally built games, books, and educational television programs are rapidly giving way to digital content on electronic devices, often handheld and mobile in the near environment. We are only beginning to understand what this digital shift might mean for young children’s language and early literacy development and what potentials these new technologies might bring to the learning environments of young children"

citation -Bus, A. G., Neuman, S. B. and Roskos, K. (2020) ‘Screens, Apps, and Digital Books for Young Children: The Promise of Multimedia’, AERA Open. doi: 10.1177/2332858420901494.

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Screens, Apps, and Digital Books for Young Children: The Promise of Multimedia - Adriana G. Bus, Susan B. Neuman, Kathleen Roskos, 2020

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Just beginning to understand the potentials new technologies might bring to the learning environments of young children, we invited authors to submit articles that investigate multimedia sources an...

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Book: The Routledge Handbook of Digital Literacies in Early Childhood (2019) 27/09

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Book: The Routledge Handbook of Digital Literacies in Early Childhood (2019) 27/09

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an extensive research book looking into the the diversity of young children’s literacy skills, practices and expertise across digital tools, technologies and media, in varied contexts, set- tings and countries for children's aged 0-8.

social class as a factor into the developments of e-picture books - "At home, children participate in technology-based practices and develop attitudes toward the “digital culture” that is and will be part of their experiences. This appropriation is influenced by the socioeconomic environment of the family" p.109

proven benefits in child education with e-books - "Research has shown that children as young as two years old develop a “positive visceral reaction” (Michael Cohen Group Llc 2011: 7) to the tablet due to its materiality (weight, size and portability facilitating very young children’s manipulation) and the interactive affordances of the touch-screen interface, which together enable them to access texts, play and learn driven by curiosity and eagerness to explore their own reading path. Research further shows that trial and error exploration are central in this process and that tablet usage develops children’s digital reading skills from novice to mastery when using well-designed apps with progressive levels that increase children’s agency" p273

counter argument - "Technology currently provides one of the most important sources of literacy development for children of all ages but without a balanced set of hypermedia, there is a serious risk of a downward reading spiral in the long-term. Considering the numerous distractors in popular apps, we suspect that the many hours spent with screen media cannot replace the time spent sharing print books with parents and teachers."

Further benefits to e-books - "Recent research by Strouse and Ganea (2017) shows that for younger children (toddlers between 17 and 26 months) parent–child reading of digital books is more beneficial than reading print books because the toddlers pay more attention and are more participative in the reading interaction with digital books. This is different from pre- schoolers where interactivity was found to be impeding parent–child conversation" p288

Future of e-books as a means of education - "All children need to come into contact with their mother tongue in what is a crucial phase in their language learning. However, across countries, children may not have access to digital stories in their mother tongue to the same extent as to those produced in English. In less wealthy countries, tablets and Smartphones are less common and this may create a digital divide between countries" - this may increase use of wordless picture books that can be used globally.

Accessibility of digital books p.316

"Every year, young children aged up to 8 years spend increasing amounts of time on Smartphones and tablets, and it is important that this time is well-spent time and includes book-reading as a main incentive for language and literacy development, preferably in the mother tongue." p.320

citation - Erstad, O. (ed.) (2020) The routledge handbook of digital literacies in early childhood. London: Routledge (The Routledge international handbook series). doi: 10.4324/9780203730638

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"Project Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks and was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related content today."

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some feedback from Eleanor:
question still too broad so by including a time frame this would help narrow it down - possibly the last 30 years. This article includes a history of e-readers as I want to be focussing on the digital advances with children's picture books.

Start of E-books - "Fast forward to 1998, and four important events happened: 1) the first dedicated eBook readers were launched: Rocket Ebook and Softbook; 2) the first ISBN issued to an eBook was obtained; 3) US Libraries began providing free eBooks to the public through their web sites and associated services; and 4) Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin"

developments in accessibility - "2007 changed the world of reading forever with Amazon’s launch of the Kindle eBook reader in the U.S. and the launch of the iPhone by Apple. In 2009, Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook, and Sony linked with libraries via the Overdrive digital network to enable library patrons to borrow eBooks from their local library."

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The History of eBooks from 1930’s “Readies” to Today’s GPO eBook Services

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To some it might seem strange that the Government Printing Office, the printer of Federal publications for over 150 years, is blogging about eBooks for “Read an eBook” Week and the 25th anniversary…

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Gorgeous children's book trailer by Moth Studio in collaboration with Davies. just one example of how animation is becoming integrated with children's books.

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Benji Davies
The Grotlyn

We once again teamed up with author and illustrator Benji Davies and composer Pierre O'Reilly to make this trailer for Benji's children's book, 'The Grotlyn'.

Published 7 September 2017 in the UK.

Published by Harper Collins

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Benji Davies The Grotlyn We once again teamed up with author and illustrator Benji Davies and composer Pierre O'Reilly to make this trailer for Benji's children's book, 'The Grotlyn'. Published 7 September 2017 in the UK. Published by Harper Collins

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p249, come back to this one for history of children's books

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Book: illustrated children's books 2009 - rlly gd book!! 23/09

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Book: illustrated children's books 2009 - rlly gd book!! 23/09

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come back to this one

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2020 Academic Article: Keep it simple: streamlining book illustrations improves attention and comprehension in beginning readers  27/09

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2020 Academic Article: Keep it simple: streamlining book illustrations improves attention and comprehension in beginning readers  27/09

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The design of reading materials can be optimized to promote literacy development in young children

"The typical design of books for beginning readers often includes engaging, colorful, detailed illustrations. There are a number of reasons for including illustrations in books for beginning readers such as defining the setting and characters, contributing to text coherence, reinforcing the text, providing additional information, and motivating the reader" - Carney, R. N. & Levin, J. R. Pictorial illustrations still improve students’ learning from text. Educ. Psychol. Rev. 14, 5–26 (2002)

"Entertaining visuals in children’s educational materials have enormous potential to engage children—but these additional visuals might be counterproductive if they are unrelated to the story text as they may distract children from the primary task (i.e., decoding the words and making meaning from the text)."

the importance of illustrations - "It is important to note that we are not advocating for the removal of illustrations from books, but rather encouraging consideration of whether and how the design of instructional reading materials for beginning readers can be optimized by taking into account children’s developing attention regulation skills"

citation - Eng, Cassondra & Godwin, Karrie & Fisher, Anna. (2020). Keep it simple: streamlining book illustrations improves attention and comprehension in beginning readers. npj Science of Learning. 5. 10.1038/s41539-020-00073-5.

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Academic article: The psychology of books for children 2018 23/09

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Academic article: The psychology of books for children 2018 23/09

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An in-depth article looking into child psychology with reading and picture books.
"Picture books are an important source of new language, concepts, and lessons for young children"
"Because infants and toddlers are just learning to use pictures symbolically to refer to other objects, features that support this insight rather than distract from it are most supportive. If the goal is to teach children new words or letters, it appears that books with realistic images are best, especially with the youngest children. If books with manipulative features are selected, they should draw attention to the educational content rather than distract from it." eg. pop ups, flaps, scratch-and-sniff,

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Counselling and Psychology in Education, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, United States

Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Picture books are an important source of new language, concepts, and lessons for young children. A large body of research has documented the nature of parent-child interactions during shared book reading. A new body of research has begun to investigate the features of picture books that support children's learning and transfer of that information to the real world. In this paper, we discuss how children's symbolic development, analogical reasoning, and reasoning about fantasy may constrain their ability to take away content information from picture books. We then review the nascent body of findings that has focused on the impact of picture book features on children's learning and transfer of words and letters, science concepts, problem solutions, and morals from picture books. In each domain of learning we discuss how children's development may interact with book features to impact their learning. We conclude that children's ability to learn and transfer content from picture books can be disrupted by some book features and research should directly examine the interaction between children's developing abilities and book characteristics on children's learning.

On the bookshelf of a pre-reader, one may find storybooks that take children to magical worlds with fantastical characters, to faraway lands with unique animals and customs, or keep them close to home with tales about backyard bullies or trips to the dentist. Alongside these, one may also find factual books about outer space, underwater creatures, or pre-historic dinosaurs. These books may differ from one another in a number of their features, including their genre, presence of fantastical elements, pictorial realism, and use of factual language. Children are expected to learn facts, concepts, or values and apply them to real life. The current body of evidence on whether children can learn and transfer new content from picture books suggests that it is important to consider both the dimensions on which the books vary and children's developing abilities. In this review we summarize the existing evidence on the effect of book features on young children's learning and transfer and outline three developmental abilities that may interact with whether children's learning will be impacted by the presence or absence of those book features.

The majority of past research on picture books has focused on the nature of the book sharing interaction between adults and children (e.g., Fletcher and Reese, 2005). This large body of research demonstrates that different picture book features shape the interactions that take place between dyads; for example expository texts lead to more maternal teaching during reading than narrative texts ( Pellegrini et al., 1990), less specific language ( Nyhout and O'Neill, 2014), and more maternal feedback ( Moschovaki and Meadows, 2005), whereas high quality illustrations lead to more child labeling of pictures ( Potter and Haynes, 2000). Mothers are more likely to point and label letters for their young children when interacting with a plain book than a book with manipulative features and children also vocalize most often about the letters and pictures in the plain book ( Chiong and DeLoache, 2012). Thus, aspects of the book can alter what both parents and children focus on. Recently the impact of book features directly on children's learning from print picture books has also received increasing attention in developmental research. Two recent reviews have provided targeted overviews of features that support vocabulary learning ( Wasik et al., 2016) and learning from fictional media more broadly ( Hopkins and Weisberg, 2017). These reviews indicate that children are selective in their learning and that properties of media can affect children's learning. In the current review, we focus specifically on learning from picture books, with the goal of outlining how three key developmental factors (symbolic development, analogical reasoning, and reasoning about fantasy) may influence young children's learning and transfer from books that vary across various dimensions. We will focus on domains of learning where most of the research on picture book features so far has been conducted with pre-readers: learning of words and letters, science concepts, problem solutions, and morals.

One goal of educational book-sharing interactions is for children to build generalizable knowledge they can learn and transfer outside of storybooks to everyday situations. By learning, we refer to the child's ability to recognize or recite information presented in a book. By transfer, we refer to an ability that goes beyond such learning: the ability to apply newly-acquired information to new exemplars or contexts. By picture books, we refer to books designed for pre-readers that contain pictures and may also contain text. We first present three developmental factors that may constrain learning and transfer from picture books. They have been selected because of their importance in supporting transfer of information across contexts, which is the focus of the studies we review here. We then provide a summary of studies investigating how features of picture books influence children's learning and transfer across a variety of educational domains by either reinforcing or working against the developmental processes presented. We conclude with ideas for new research and ways in which parents and educators can scaffold children's learning and transfer from picture books.

Developmental Factors Influencing Children's Learning from Picture Books

Children's ability to transfer knowledge from picture books to the real world may be constrained by developments in their symbolic understanding, analogical reasoning, and their understanding of fantasy and reality. Although we discuss them separately, these areas of development are interwoven. As we will see, these developmental factors can be used to explain experimental findings on children's learning and transfer from picture books, as well as identify areas for future research.

Symbolic Development

One particular challenge that children may face when learning and applying real-world information from picture books is that of symbolic insight ( DeLoache, 1991). That is, children need to be able to think flexibly about books as entities in themselves as well as symbolic sources of information about the world. For example, when reading an informational book about new animals such as South American cavies, children need to realize that they are reading a book with pages that can be flipped and pictures that tell a story about 2-dimensional cavies. They also need to recognize that the cavies on the page are intended to be representative of animals in the real world that have the same name ("cavies") and features. Understanding that a picture in a book is an object that represents another entity is a symbolic task. This may not be a straightforward task for children especially since pictures in children's book can vary on the nature of their relation to the referent, that is, whether the picture represents real concrete (e.g., a cat) and abstract (e.g., letters and numbers) entities or imaginary entities (e.g., talking cats, talking pots, unicorns; Ganea and Canfield, 2015). Beyond the basic understanding that pictures are symbolic and stand for their referents, children will have to figure out what the nature of the referent is.

Young children often struggle with tasks that require symbolic reasoning. For example, 2-year-olds struggle to use information from videos and pictures of a room to help them find an object hidden in the real version of the room ( Troseth and DeLoache, 1998). Despite the fact that these toddlers can easily point out and label the corresponding objects in the pictures and in the room, they do not transfer information from one to the other. Presumably this is because they think of the picture and the room each as a separate entity, and do not make the connection that the hidden object in the picture also represents a life-sized object hiding behind a pillow in the life-sized room. In addition, pictures in books are "impoverished" compared to information presented in real life because they provide only one visual perspective, lack depth cues like motion parallax and changing shadows, and may be low resolution. Simcock and DeLoache (2006) assert that perceptual differences between images in picture books and objects in the real world present a barrier to children's ability to use picture books symbolically, as a source of information about the world. This problem is not specific to young children's use of information from picture books, but from other symbolic media as well, such as videos ( Anderson and Pempek, 2005; Barr, 2013). There is some evidence that transfer difficulties are similar across different media (books vs. videos; Brito et al., 2012), although there is also evidence of medium-specific differences in transfer (books vs. touchscreens; Strouse and Ganea, 2017). For the remainder of this review we will focus specifically on factors influencing young children's transfer from picture books.

Various features of picture books may differentially affect children's ability to treat the information symbolically. For example, pictures that more clearly represent the objects they depict may support children in recognizing the link between book depictions and the real world ( Ganea et al., 2008; Ganea and Canfield, 2015). As such, unrealistic portrayals such as cartoonish images, fantastical settings, and depictions of animals with human characteristics may present particular challenges for children and will be reviewed below. Tactile features may pose a similar challenge, as they may highlight the book as an object, rather than as a symbol with information to be conveyed about the real world. These interactions between symbolic understanding and book features will be reviewed across various domains of learning below.

Analogical Reasoning

For successful transfer of complex information and concepts, children may need more than symbolic insight. To transfer basic information like the name of a novel animal from a picture book, children need to activate a representation of the animal in the book and remember details about its appearance to correctly apply the label to the real-world animal. To transfer more complex concepts, such as the ability for animals (in general) to use color camouflage to hide from predators, children must also recognize the abstract features of the depicted example and apply these to novel instances. Transferring conceptual information from one domain to another-in this case, from the picture book to the real world-requires children to recognize the abstract relational structure between the two domains ( Gentner, 1989).

Children's ability to reason analogically depends somewhat on the difficulty of the task and their existing knowledge of the relations used in the analogy ( Goswami, 1991). When they have experience in a domain, children as young as 1 or 2 years can use deep rather than surface features to solve analogical problems (e.g., Brown, 1990; Chen et al., 1997). However, when domain knowledge is limited, children without prior conceptual knowledge may be reliant on surface-level features to help them look for commonalities across analogical cases ( Brown, 1989). One benefit of picture books as an educational resource is that they can provide children access to content that they would not experience in their day-to-day lives. However, this very feature of picture books may make analogical transfer especially difficult. For example, if children's understanding of color camouflage is tied to specific picture book illustrations (e.g., a frog) and surface features of that example (e.g., greenishness), they will likely fail to transfer the concept to other animals or contexts.

As with symbolic reasoning, various features of picture books may differentially affect children's ability to analogically transfer conceptual information in books. For example, given that perceptual similarity between transfer contexts facilitates analogical reasoning ( Crisafi and Brown, 1986; Brown, 1989), children's transfer of new content from books with fantastical contexts and characters should be more impacted than transfer from books with realistic contexts and characters ( Richert et al., 2009). If we expect children to learn and transfer novel content from picture books to a real-world context, stories that are more similar in surface structure to the real world would be easier for children to use a source of information about the world. Interactions between book features and analogical reasoning will be reviewed below.

Reasoning about Fantasy and Reality

Children also have the challenge of determining which information in picture books should even be transferred. Anthropomorphism, or animals with attributes characteristic of humans, may be especially confusing when some information is meant to generalize and other information is meant to be true only in the story world. For example, if the cavies in a story talk and wear clothes, children must separate this anthropomorphization of cavies from factual information, inhibit transferring the unrealistic attributes, and selectively transfer only the factual information presented. Children's learning from picture books must be selective in that they have to separate what information is fictional versus what could be true in reality, which is generally referred to as the "reader's dilemma" ( Potts et al., 1989; Gerrig and Prentice, 1991).

The process of keeping real-world knowledge separate from fictional or false information encountered in a story context may be especially difficult in early childhood because children between the ages of 3 and 8 are just beginning to differentiate fantasy and reality ( Woolley and Cox, 2007). According to Woolley and Ghossainy (2013) young children are "naïve skeptics" when it comes to judging the reality status of fictional information. Instead of over-incorporating fantastical information into their real-world concepts, children err on the side of rejecting factual information presented. For example, 4- to 8-year-olds were more likely to state that an improbable event is impossible than to accept an impossible event as possible ( Shtulman and Carey, 2007). A bias toward skepticism may impede transfer of educational information, as children may tend to not transfer details they are uncertain are "real."

The ability to accurately distinguish reality and fantasy may also be related to children's representational development. Corriveau and Harris (2015) found that 3- to 4-year-olds accurately distinguished historical and fantastical characters in narratives at the same time that they started passing false belief and false signs tasks, suggesting that an understanding of representation (both mental and symbolic) may underlie the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Picture books, both in terms of their prose and illustrations, may be designed to represent reality or to represent make-believe. Corriveau and Harris (2015) argue that children may have difficulty deciding which of the two functions a particular story may fulfill. Thus, children's ability to separate fantasy from reality may depend both on their recognition that a story stands for something and their ability to judge what that something is (reality or pretend). In addition, children's own experiences and background knowledge may influence the aspects of stories they view as realistic versus fantastical ( Corriveau et al., 2015).

Books with unrealistic content, such as impossible events or anthropomorphic depictions of animals, may present a challenge to children in separating which aspects of the book apply to the real world and which belong only in the book. Therefore, we again expect books with realistic content to be more supportive of learning transfer, especially when learning conceptual information such as scientific facts and concepts. Although these book features interact with the two other developmental factors discussed above-symbolic development and analogical reasoning-we also expect the developing ability to reason about what is real and what is fantastical to constrain or enable learning and transfer.

The following sections provide a review of how particular aspects of picture books (such as genre, pictorial realism, and the presence of manipulative features) interact with the three developmental factors we have proposed to influence children's transfer from picture books. We chose not to present this review as systematic or definitive, as research in many areas is in its early stages (see Table 1). Rather, we present information about how our identified developmental factors inform our understanding about children's learning from various book features and areas for further consideration in picture book research. We focus predominately on pre-readers who are listening to an adult read while they view the book's pictures.

Table 1. Summary of book features' impact on learning and transfer in each learning domain.

Domains of Learning

Particular features of picture books, such as the specific content they incorporate, or the way in which the content is presented, may influence children's tendency to learn and transfer the educational content to real-world situations. Below we review studies that investigate some of these features, organized by the domain in which the educational content is presented. We have chosen this organization because particular features may be more influential in some learning domains than others. For example, visual features may be important when learning vocabulary, where children may be fairly successful at transfer on the basis of matching up perceptual features of objects. However, contextual information may be more important in science domains where transfer often takes place on a conceptual level. The domains we have chosen are primarily the domains in which the impact of picture book features on transfer of information presented in books have been studied. In each section, we address the book features that have been studied in that domain, interpreted with regard to our three developmental factors. Future work is needed to address how book features influence transfer in other domains such as math and the arts, as well as how additional book features impact transfer.

Word and Letter Learning

Picture books expose children to rich language. For example, picture books contain a richer diversity of words ( Montag et al., 2015) and a greater incidence of rare grammatical constructions ( Cameron-Faulkner and Noble, 2013) than child-directed speech. In addition, caregivers use a larger number and wider variety of words during reading than other activities ( Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991). It is not surprising, then, that joint reading has been associated with a variety of later language outcomes, including vocabulary growth and early literacy skills like letter knowledge (e.g., Bus et al., 1995). Here we are interested in particular features of books that may support the process of language learning from picture books on a less protracted scale-words and letters learned from individual reading sessions. We expect that symbolic understanding plays an especially important role in this domain, as transfer of a new word to a new context heavily depends on recognition of the labeled item in the book as representing objects in the real world to which the label also applies ( Preissler and Carey, 2004; Ganea et al., 2008, 2009). Thus, features of books that make the link between depicted objects and real world referents clearer or easier to discern should support transfer, whereas features of books that make these links more difficult to recognize may make transfer more difficult. The book features that have been most studied in this domain include pictorial realism, manipulative features, and fantastical contexts.

Pictorial Realism

Picture books vary in the degree to which their pictures represent reality, from photographs to illustrations to cartoonish line drawings. An image that is highly iconic, or visually very similar to its referent, may highlight the relation between the picture book image and real-world instances. As such, we might predict photographs to be the most supportive of children's transfer of knowledge from books to reality.

Newborn infants perceive and distinguish the dimensional nature of pictures from real objects. If presented with a complex object and a photograph of it, they clearly prefer the real object ( Slater et al., 1984). However, when presented with photographs alone, 9-month-olds interact with them in ways similar to how they would interact with the real object they represent-by hitting, rubbing, and grasping the photographs ( Pierroutsakos and DeLoache, 2003). Their behavior suggests they have not yet grasped the symbolic function of pictures.

As infants reach the middle of their second year, they begin to treat pictures referentially, by pointing and labeling the depicted objects ( DeLoache et al., 1998). Research also indicates that in their second year of life children understand the representational status of pictures ( Preissler and Carey, 2004; Ganea et al., 2009). Yet, children's transfer of novel words from picture books to the real world referent can be impacted by pictorial realism at these ages. Ganea et al. (2008) showed 15- and 18-month-olds picture books presenting both familiar and novel objects in the form of photographs, realistic color drawings that closely resembled the photographs, or color cartoons which were less detailed and more distorted in appearance. After being read the book by a researcher (told the names for the pictured objects), children of both ages were able to recognize the labeled object they had seen in the book regardless of the type of image. However, children who were read the cartoon book did not generalize to a picture of a new exemplar different in color. Eighteen-month-olds transferred the label to its physical real-word referent across all three conditions, but 15-month-olds did so only in the photograph and drawing conditions. Taken together, these findings suggest that transfer from the photographs was easiest for children, and transfer from cartoons the most difficult. With age, children get better at transferring from perceptually dissimilar depictions to real objects, although there is evidence that the iconicity of pictures continues to play a role in some picture transfer tasks even at 3 years of age ( Callaghan, 2000; Mareovich and Peralta, 2015). The impact of iconicity on young children's learning from picture books has also been found with other measures, such as imitation ( Simcock and DeLoache, 2006). Thus, at young ages, when children are first beginning to think symbolically, their understanding that pictures stand for real objects interacts with the type of depictions in books.

Manipulative Features

The term "manipulative features" has been used to refer to features that are "designed to increase children's physical interaction with [a] book," like lift-a-flap, scratch-and-sniff, and other three-dimensional add-ons ( Tare et al., 2010, p. 396). These features may be entertaining for children, but research suggests they may not be optimal for learning. One reason they may not be optimal for learning is that they may draw attention away from links between the book and the real world. For young children who are still learning to use pictures in books as "standing for" real objects, this may distract from the insight necessary for transfer of learned information.

Using books designed to teach children animal names, Tare et al. (2010) tested the helping or hindering influence of manipulative features on 18- to 22-month-olds' learning and transfer of the animal names. Children were read a book by a researcher featuring 9 animals either using a commercially presented manipulative book (with flaps and pull tabs) or a scanned copy of the book (without manipulative features). At test, children who had seen a copy of the book without manipulatives correctly generalized a new animal name to new pictures and a replica of the animal. Children who read the book with manipulative features did not perform above chance. In another study, researchers compared 30- to 36-month-olds' learning of letters from a manipulative alphabet book with pulls, flaps and textures to a book without these features ( Chiong and DeLoache, 2012). Children learned more letters from the simple alphabet book than the manipulative one. The authors argued that the salience of manipulative features may render them more like objects themselves and less like symbols that stand for other objects than their 2D counterparts. Children's difficulty transferring labels from manipulative books may therefore stem from a difficulty in "seeing past" the fancy features to realize that the content is representational, meaningful, and applicable to other contexts.

Another possibility is that children's mental effort is engaged with interaction with the features rather than attending to the content. For example, pulling a tab in an alphabet book to make a truck move does not help to emphasize the correspondence between the letter T and the first sound in the word "truck." There is other evidence that features that require additional mental effort, like having multiple large pictures on each page, can result in cognitive overload, disrupting learning ( Flack and Horst, 2017). Flack and Horst (2017) read 3- to 5-year-olds books with one or two regular-sized illustrations per page spread or one large image per spread. New objects in the pictures were labeled with new words during reading. At test, children were asked to identify the referent of the labels by pointing to the correct objects on a book page. Children were more successful when they had seen one illustration, regardless of size, indicating that two illustrations may have resulted in cognitive overload. The researchers did not assess transfer of learning. In a follow-up study, a hand gesture that directed children to the correct illustration supported learning from the book with two pictures per spread. In light of these effects of cognitive overload on children's learning, more research is needed to determine whether manipulatives are particularly disruptive of symbolic insight, whether they result in cognitive overload, or both.

Research shows that not all manipulative features are detrimental to children's learning. Multimedia researchers have argued that extra book features that engage children with the educational content of books (called "considerate," Labbo and Kuhn, 2000) can support learning. A recent meta-analysis of studies involving electronic books with considerate enhancements like animated pictures, music, and sound effects were supportive of vocabulary learning for preschool and elementary children ( Takacs et al., 2015). While we know of no similar results with manipulative features of print books, one study suggests that manipulatives designed to draw attention to the educational content, in this case the shape of letters, did not distract 3-year-olds from learning the letter names ( Chiong and DeLoache, 2012).

For both word and letter learning, the manipulative features traditionally found in print books do not appear to facilitate learning and transfer, and in cases when the features are irrelevant to the book's educational content, may even interfere with it. Content-central manipulatives that highlight educational content, such as highlighting the visual shape of a letter-the crucial component for transferring the letter name to new instances of the letter-may hold promise in facilitating symbolic insight, and thus transfer. Research in this area will become especially crucial as the features available in digital books continue to expand.

Fantastical Contexts

In picture books both fantastical and realistic, children may encounter new and unusual vocabulary. However, we might predict that realistic story contexts provide more cues to children that they can use to match story depictions and contexts with real-world situations. The similarity between the learning and transfer contexts can provide support for symbolic insight-recognizing the similarity between a symbol and its referent-as well as for analogical transfer. A recent intervention with low-income preschoolers investigated the effect of fantastical or realistic content on children's word learning ( Weisberg et al., 2015). Children were presented with a set of realistic or fantastical commercial picture books and toys. The researchers measured children's comprehension of the vocabulary presented in the books and toys receptively and asked them to tell everything they knew about the tested word (e.g., "What are weeds?"). Across both conditions, children showed similar gains in identifying the tested objects. However, children in the fantastical condition were able to provide more information about the objects when given open-ended prompts. This study suggests that children learned more about the target objects in the fantastical contexts. Importantly, however, this study did not assess any type of transfer to the real world, and no distinction was made between fantastical and realistic information in explanations given by children. How fantasy may influence children's ability to transfer labels to new exemplars or real-world referents remains to be investigated. Consideration of the developmental factors we identified here-symbolic insight, analogical transfer, and reasoning about fantasy and reality-would lead one to predict that children will have more difficulty transferring labels from fantastical than realistic books to real-world referents.

Summary: Picture Books and Word and Letter Learning

Picture books are a rich source of new language. Because infants and toddlers are just learning to use pictures symbolically to refer to other objects, features that support this insight rather than distract from it are most supportive. If the goal is to teach children new words or letters, it appears that books with realistic images are best, especially with the youngest children. If books with manipulative features are selected, they should draw attention to the educational content rather than distract from it. More research is needed to determine the influence of realistic versus fantastical contexts on children's transfer of new words they have learned to other contexts, as well as how these contexts interact with children's developing abilities to distinguish fantasy and reality. Future research could consider not only the variety of picture arrangements on a page ( Flack and Horst, 2017) but also the type of backgrounds that pictures are displayed on and the type of object arrangements (whether an object is displayed with objects from the same category or a different category). An insightful analysis of the structure of children's books for children aged 0 and 3 was provided by Kummerling-Meibauer and Meibauer (2011) and future research could use it as a guideline to experimentally test what types of book structures are most inducive to young children's word and letter learning.

Learning Biological Facts and Concepts

Children's learning about non-human animals has been the focus of most studies of children's biology learning from picture books. Children are naturally interested in animals from a young age ( DeLoache et al., 2011) and animals feature heavily in books designed for young children ( Marriott, 2002). Thus, this domain for learning involves the largest amount of research on the impact of picture book features on transfer. A subset of studies has investigated biological concepts that apply to humans and non-human animals alike, including nutrition ( Gripshover and Markman, 2013) and adaptation by natural selection ( Kelemen et al., 2014). Another, reviewed here, focused on teaching children a novel biological causal relationship ( Walker et al., 2014).

As is the case when learning the correspondence between words and letters and their referents, symbolic understanding can also play an important role in learning and transfer of biological facts and concepts. However, transfer of conceptual knowledge requires more than just symbolically matching a picture with its real-world referent; it often involves more complex reasoning about similarities between situations and selection of the correct details for transfer. Therefore analogical reasoning and discrimination between fantasy and reality should play a much more central role in young children's learning of biological information from picture books than it did for word and letter learning. The book features that have been studied in this domain include manipulative features, fantastical contexts, anthropomorphism, and genre.

Manipulative Features

Concerns about the use of manipulative features in biology learning mirror those for word learning. When children are learning to symbolically link picture books and the real world, distracting features in books may disrupt that link. In one study with 27- to 39-month-olds, children were read either a pop-up book, a book with realistic images, or a book with drawings ( Tare et al., 2010, Study 2). During book sharing, the experimenter told the child four facts about the dietary preferences of animals depicted in the books (e.g., chicks like to eat worms). Children who were read the pop-up book learned fewer facts from the book than children who were read the books without pop-up features. This study did not assess transfer of those facts to new contexts, but demonstrates that features that distract from or obscure the basic correspondence between pictures and their referent operate to decrease learning in the biological domain, as with word and letter learning.

Fantastical Contexts

Although fantasy may be a much-loved and engaging genre, what do the violations of reality inherent to this genre mean for children's learning and transfer? Fantastical books may vary widely by mixing characters, settings, and events that vary in their realistic nature. Books with fantastical aspects could be an especially good choice for young children because they may engage children in imaginative thinking. Imaginative play may facilitate better causal reasoning ( Walker and Gopnik, 2013), better deductive reasoning ( Dias and Harris, 1988), and increased empathy for and understanding of others ( Mar and Oatley, 2008). Parker and Lepper (1992) suggest that fantasy contexts may also be highly educational because they are engaging and motivating for children (see also Hopkins and Weisberg, 2017). However, fantastical contexts may make it more difficult for children to see links between books and reality, whether symbolically or analogically. Fantastical contexts may also make it more difficult for children to identify what information in books is real and should be transferred.

In a study of children's causal learning from realistic versus fantastical picture books, Walker et al. (2014) presented 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds with one of two fictional picture books and tested their generalization of a fictional target biological causal relation: Popple Flowers cause hiccups when one sniffs them. The target relation was couched in either a realistic world (e.g., a boy climbs a tree) or a fantastical world (e.g., a boy has a conversation with a tree). In both books, the boy sniffs a popple flower and gets hiccups. Children were then asked to judge whether events in the story "could really happen" or "cannot really happen, and are just pretend." Next, children were told by the experimenter that she smelled a Popple Flower earlier and asked whether they thought she did or did not get hiccups. When the fictional story world was more realistic, children were more likely to judge the target relation as something that "could really happen" and to predict that the experimenter got hiccups from smelling the flower herself. The tendency to transfer the target information from the more fantastical world decreased with age, as children's ability to distinguish fantasy and reality matured. This study indicates that when children are asked to transfer information from the story to a supposed real-world situation (a real person sniffing a Popple Flower) they rely on contextual information presented in the story to reason about whether the information should be transferred or not. In the case of the fantastical story, the context of the story world and the real world were less similar than in the case of the realistic story, thus decreasing the chance of analogical transfer. Also, as noted before, when children are uncertain about the fantastical status of information, they tend to be skeptical, erring on the side of caution when determining what is real. Fantastical contexts may cue children that information in the story is irrelevant to their situation and thus decrease their tendency to apply the information to realistic contexts.

Anthropomorphism

In an analysis of 1,064 modern picture books, Marriott (2002) concluded that picture books typically present the animal kingdom and its natural environment in an inaccurate and misleading manner, including a tendency toward anthropomorphism. Providing animals with habitats and traits that are realistic for humans may be an especially difficult type of fantasy for children to recognize, as these features may fit comfortably with their own personal experiences of the world. For example, it may seem plausible that animals would cry when sad or sleep with a blanket because those are part of children's everyday lives. Recent evidence demonstrates that children may struggle to distinguish between the anthropomorphic characteristics portrayed in stories and the real characteristics of animals. This struggle could influence the information that children transfer from stories to the real world.

In one study, Ganea et al. (2014) created two types of picture books about novel animals: one with factual language and another with anthropomorphic language. Both book types contained realistic images, and provided facts about each target animal. Across both book types, 3- to 5-year-olds who were read the books by a researcher learned the target facts presented in the picture books. Importantly, however, children who heard anthropomorphic stories about novel animals more often attributed anthropomorphic characteristics (e.g., feeling proud, having friends) to real animals in photographs than did those who heard the stories with no anthropomorphic language. Thus, children sometimes incorrectly transferred anthropomorphic attributes to real animals.

In a second study, Ganea et al. (2014) investigated the impact of anthropomorphic images on children's fact learning and tendency to anthropomorphize. They presented a new group of 3- and 5-year-old children with books about novel animals that contained either factual or anthropomorphic language. In this case, both book types included anthropomorphic illustrations (e.g., animals eating at a dinner table). Children in the full anthropomorphic condition (anthropomorphic images + language) answered fewer factual questions correctly than children in the anthropomorphic images only condition (with factual language). Children in the full anthropomorphic condition also attributed more anthropomorphic characteristics to real animals. These findings suggest anthropomorphic language may be particularly confusing for children.

Using storybooks with subtler forms of anthropomorphism, Geerdts et al. (2015) investigated the effects of anthropomorphism on 3- to 6-year-old children's learning about camouflage. In their anthropomorphic books, animals were portrayed with human-like faces and postures, but in their natural environment. Children read a picture book with either factual or anthropomorphized language, combined with either realistic or these subtler anthropomorphic pictures. In general, transfer was low-only a group of boys exposed to the book with the anthropomorphic pictures transferred information about camouflage to realistic situations at test, and there were no condition differences in the psychological properties children attributed to animals. The study had only 12 children per condition, so limited conclusions can be drawn about the lack of condition effects. Future research will need to address whether the style of anthropomorphic depictions has an impact on what children learn and transfer from stories.

Another recent study offers insights into how anthropomorphic depictions influence children's biological reasoning and learning. Waxman et al. (2014) told 5-year-olds a novel fact either about dogs or about humans (i.e., "Dogs/Humans have andro inside them."). They then read children a few pages from an anthropomorphic book (Berenstain Bears) or a realistic book (an animal encyclopedia entry). After the realistic book children reasoned that bears had andro regardless of whether they had been told the fact about humans or dogs. After the anthropomorphic book, children reasoned that bears had andro only if they had been told the fact about humans. This study suggests that anthropomorphic portrayals may lead children to think of those animals as more human-like, and even a very brief exposure to depictions of animals in picture books (whether anthropomorphic or realistic) can influence the way they reason about non-human animals as having human traits.

Children's anthropocentric biases may also interact with the format of the books in which they encounter novel animals. We know that children from rural communities, who likely had more experience with nature, are less like to take an anthropocentric perspective than urban children ( Waxman and Medin, 2007), perhaps because they have more first-hand experience that allows them to accurately identify anthropomorphic portrayals as fantastical. On the other hand, urban children who lack first-hand experience with a variety of animals may instead have anthropomorphic reasoning reinforced through other sources, such as media depictions (e.g., picture books) and conversations ( Herrmann et al., 2010). These different anthropocentric biases may affect the extent to which children transfer information they encounter in a fantastical book about animals, with rural children less likely to transfer anthropomorphic information and urban children more so. Anthropomorphic depictions of animals in picture books may in turn increase children's tendency to consider animals as human-like, especially for children who have limited first-hand experience with other species. As researchers work to follow up the potentially positive roles that anthropomorphic characters may play, parents and teachers can work to dispel biological misconceptions by talking with their children about which characteristics are real and which are not ( McCrindle and Odendaal, 1994; Marriott, 2002; Gebhard et al., 2003). Thus, supporting children's fantasy-reality distinction through discussion can support children who have not fully developed this ability to appropriately learn and apply information from books to the real world.

Genre

Children may also use book genre as a cue to determine whether information should be transferred to new contexts or is applicable only to story worlds. Children's books can be divided broadly into fiction (generally narratives) and non-fiction (informational, generally non-narrative) genres. Informational texts are realistic non-fiction books that are designed to convey information about the natural and social worlds ( Duke, 2000). Informational books play an important role in classrooms; imagine learning organic chemistry or algebra without a textbook! Despite their prevalence in advanced classrooms, informational texts are rare in early childhood and early elementary classrooms ( Pressley et al., 1996; Duke, 2000). Although sales in the informational book genre have grown in recent years, sales for children's fiction remain approximately four times higher ( Milliot, 2015). The traditional absence of information books from early childhood contexts may be the result of a widely held assumption that narrative is the more effective genre for engaging children ( Donovan and Smolkin, 2001; Duke et al., 2003; Mantzicopoulos and Patrick, 2011). However, a recent study found that preschoolers actually preferred information books over fictional ones, and teachers found the content more transferrable to real life ( Kotaman and Tekin, 2017).

One hallmark of informational books is that they contain more generic language than narrative books ( Gelman et al., 2012). Laboratory studies have shown that 3- and 4-year-olds are sensitive to differences in language and extend properties to larger categories when they hear generic language ( Cimpian and Markman, 2008). Due to the differences in style of language used by the books, we might expect children to more readily transfer information from informational books. For example, a narrative book about cavies might contain the statement, "Dave the cavie eats fruit," whereas an informational book might state, "Cavies eat fruit." Based on Cimpian and Markman's (2008) findings we might predict that the generic nature of the second statement could act as a cue that all cavies eat fruit, rather than the specific cavie named Dave. However, it may be the case that children's generalization is robust to differences in genre and language specificity when the type of content applies at the category level (e.g., about diet). When mothers share picture books with children they provide both generic and specific language when offering natural facts about animals, suggesting generalizable facts are not consistently in generic language ( Nyhout and O'Neill, 2014).

No studies have addressed learning biological information from non-narrative information versus narrative fiction specifically; however, one study compared two books where some of the language differed in specificity. Three- and four-year-olds were read one of two narrative picture books designed to teach the concept of color camouflage ( Ganea et al., 2011). The factual book contained a combination of general statements about frogs interspersed with a narrative about a specific bird and frog called "the bird" and "the frog." In the intentional book, the frog was named "Sammy" and generic statements about frogs were replaced with specific statements about Sammy. The intentional book also included statements anthropomorphizing the intentions of the animals, e.g., "Sammy tricked the bird." Three- and four-year-olds successfully transferred information about camouflage to novel situations presented using photos of frogs and other animals regardless of which book they read. Four-year-olds also transferred to live animals in tanks. The study shows that children can transfer biological information from books to the real world when both types of language are used. Further research will be needed to establish whether generic language used in books provides a cue to children about transfer, as one may expect from other research, and whether other genre-related book features influence children's learning.

Summary: Picture Books and Biology Learning

Differences in book features appear to have significant effects on children's ability to extract and transfer biological information to the real world. Fantastical contexts used in stories may cue children that information presented in books is not transferrable to real-world contexts. Because children tend to err on the side of caution when reasoning about what events could really happen, children may fail to apply accurate biological information presented in fantastical stories, dismissing it as unrealistic. In contrast, anthropomorphic details in stories appear to push children's reasoning in the opposite direction-influencing children to reason about animals as similar to humans and potentially motivating them to accept inaccurate biological information about animals. This may be mediated by experience; children without extensive experience with animals may use their own personal (human) experience to help them distinguish what is realistic. Adults may help to dispel misconceptions about animals by talking with children about the characteristics portrayed in stories. In either case, realistic books may more readily support analogical transfer by portraying contexts similar to the real world and characteristics that are appropriate for transfer.

Finally, book genre has the potential to support transfer via its use of stylistic features such as language and image type. More research is needed to determine the extent to which the specificity of language used or other genre-related features support children's acquisition of biological information from picture books. Contexts that more clearly resemble reality may support both the symbolic insight needed for learning in transfer in children's early acquisition of biological facts from books (e.g., chicks eat worms) and the analogical reasoning needed for later acquisition of scientific concepts (e.g., camouflage).

Physics

The task of learning physics concepts is similar to that of learning biological concepts in many ways. First, information may require conceptual abstraction beyond lining up surface features-e.g., both natural selection and centrifugal force apply in situations that vary greatly in context. Thus, picture book features that are based on visual similarity (like pictorial realism) may be less important for supporting transfer than features that support insight into analogical contexts. However, the necessary mismatches between the fantastical details in stories and real-world contexts may make it more difficult for children to recognize similarities between the contexts, thus disrupting analogical transfer. Second, realistic and unrealistic information about both biology and physics is often mixed together in children's stories, making fantasy-reality distinctions particularly difficult. For example, in The Magic School Bus and the Electric Field Trip, children are taught about electricity through a narrative in which the school bus shrinks to the size of an electron-violating certain laws of physics while intending to teach others. The necessary mismatches between the fantastical details in stories and real-world contexts may make it more difficult for children to recognize similarities between the contexts, thus disrupting analogical transfer. Despite their similarities, however, there is reason to expect that children will treat information about biology and physics differently. Sobel and Weisberg (2014) found that 4-year-olds who constructed a story were more likely to include events involving physical violations (e.g., walking through a wall) than biological ones (e.g., aging backwards), indicating that children found reality-violating physical events and contexts more acceptable than reality-violating biological events in their stories.

Two very recent studies indicate that books appear to be good tools for teaching children transferrable concepts about physics. Ganea et al. (2017) found that 6- and 7-year-olds with misconceptions about balance showed improved understanding of balance on a real-world task regardless of whether they were read a realistic or fantastical book about balancing a see-saw. The majority of children maintained this improvement at a follow-up visit after a 1-week delay. In another study, 4- and 5-year-olds learned and transferred information about gravity and falling objects equally well from an informational or narrative picture book read to them by a researcher ( Venkadasalam and Ganea, 2017). From the sparse evidence available, transfer of physical science concepts does not appear to be easily disrupted by manipulations of fantastical context or genre as in other domains, although more research, using a broader range of concepts, is needed. In addition, both studies reviewed here involved children learning accurate real-world physical information from books. Future research on fantastical contexts should address whether children are able to discriminate accurate physics information from violations of reality (e.g., shrinking busses) and appropriately apply the real but not the fantastical information to real-world situations.

Problem Solving

Problem solving occurs when one wants to achieve a goal and no obvious solution occurs to the problem-solver ( Mayer and Wittrock, 1996). The problem solver accesses their own knowledge and skills to develop a solution. When the problem solved is different from problems encountered previously, this involves a process of transfer. As with all problems of transfer, the problem solver must recognize similarities between what was originally learned and the new context-in this case, similar features of problems. The child must also recognize the solution in the story as a representation of a problem solution that is potentially relevant to events beyond the book context. Symbolic reasoning may help children recognize that information is symbolic and transferrable, and analogical reasoning skills may help children identify potentially relevant contexts for transfer. Thus, we may expect children's skills in these areas to be especially relevant when transferring problem solutions from stories to the real world.

An interesting feature of problem-solution transfer is that is can often occur after a substantial delay. A child may not encounter a relevant real-world problem until days, weeks, or even months after reading the story. The child must recall and recognize the abstract similarities between the story problem and the problem they face that goes beyond the surface features of the two problems. For example, a story character may retrieve a ball stuck in a rafter using a broom. The child may later use a similar strategy to retrieve a ball stuck in a tree using a hockey stick.

As we discuss in more detail below, children's ability to distinguish fantasy and reality may also influence their transfer of problem solutions. Problem solutions present in fantastical stories can be relevant to the real world, and children with a better grasp of possibility may be better able to apply solutions from fantasy to the real world. Children who approach fantastical events with skepticism are unlikely to transfer solutions from these types of stories.

Pictorial Realism

In problem solving tasks that can be solved with some reliance on visual similarity, pictorial realism can impact young children's transfer. Books that incorporate pictures that are more similar to real objects, like photographs, help children align book objects with their real-world referents, and transfer skills they have learned from a book. Simcock and DeLoache (2006) showed 18-, 24-, and 30-month-olds a picture book which portrayed the assembly of a ball, jar, and stick into rattle. After a delay, they were given real versions of the objects and asked tested on whether they assembled the pieces into a rattle. Children at all ages assembled the rattle when they had read a book with color photographs of the objects. Children in the two older age groups transferred the solution from color line drawings, and only children in the oldest group transferred the solution from the book with pencil drawings. This study shows that the pictorial realism of the pictures in the book influenced children's transfer of the rattle assembly, and that this book feature interacts with development. When realistic photos are used, even 13-month-olds can use information presented in a picture book to make inductive inferences about non-obvious properties of real objects and attempt to elicit those properties through particular actions that were depicted in the book ( Keates et al., 2014; see also Khu et al., 2014 for a study using the same task).

Fantastical Contexts

Simcock and DeLoache's (2006) task required transfer of a solution in which the learning and transfer contexts were highly visually matched. However, as with transfer of scientific concepts, transfer of problem solutions often requires considering deep features rather than surface-level characteristics. This requires skill in analogical reasoning. There are also important differences between transfer of science concepts and problem solutions. In the case of biology and physics, children are tasked with separating realistic from unrealistic information and only transferring that which is applicable to the real world. In the case of biology, this appears to often be difficult for children, as they are not good at distinguishing the two and tend to err on the side of rejecting anything that may seem unrealistic. However, for those who can distinguish appropriately, a lack of realism may act as a useful cue that particular information should not be transferred.

In problem solving, however, the ability to distinguish between realistic and unrealistic information may be less important because solutions to fantastical problems are often applicable to real-world situations if deep features are considered. Even children who can appropriately distinguish fantastical portrayals may struggle to apply problem solutions optimally because their skepticism toward applying fantastical information may lead them to dismiss solutions presented in fantastical contexts even when the problem solution would apply to real-world problems.

In one study, 3- to 6-year-olds were read two "social interaction" stories (joining a friend group and taking another's perspective) and two "physical solution" stories (wrapping and stacking) featuring either human or fantastical characters ( Richert et al., 2009). Children more readily transferred solutions to real-world social and physical problems from a story with real characters than one with fantastical characters.

Similarly, Richert and Smith (2011) compared 3- to 5-year-old children's ability to transfer solutions for novel problem types presented in full-length, commercial picture books when read by a researcher. Children were presented with a point-of-view problem, in which the solution was for the character to hide from an individual by standing behind him, and a pulling problem, in which the solution was to attach a suction cup attached to a rope to move an object. Again, children were more likely to transfer the solution to the real world when the problems had been presented in a realistic version of the picture book than a fantastical version.

Similar to the pattern seen in the biological domain, fantastical contexts appear to make transferring problem solutions to real-world situations more difficult for children. In problem solution tasks, children need to identify analogical similarities between a problem presented in a book and a problem faced in the lab. Skill in fantasy-reality discrimination may support children in realizing that problem solutions in fantastical contexts may apply to real world problems. In support of this interpretation, Richert and Schlesinger (2016) found that 3- to 6-year-old children with a better understanding of the fantasy-reality distinction were better able to learn and transfer problem solutions from video stories when fantastical elements were present and relevant to the solution being presented. Fantastical elements that were incidental appeared to distract children and interfere with transfer. More research is needed to identify other features of books that influence children's transfer of problem solving strategies.

Moral Learning

Many popular children's characters have encountered a bully, lied, or had bad dreams. Adults may choose these books hoping they will teach children information they can use in their own daily experiences. However, adults should not assume that pre-readers readily extract the moral messages intended by authors. Even as late as third grade, children have difficulty identifying the moral themes of oral stories when asked to explicitly describe them ( Narvaez et al., 1998). These researchers report that children often choose responses that have superficial characteristics in common with the story rather than appropriate thematic responses.

As with science learning and problem solving, children cannot rely on surface-level features to extract moral themes. As such, we might expect analogical reasoning and fantasy-reality distinction to play important roles in learning moral messages. As with problem solving, although morals presented in unrealistic contexts may be applicable to real-world situations, even children with the ability to distinguish fantasy and reality may tend not to transfer moral lessons.

In addition to the challenges discussed in other domains, learning thematic messages from books may be an additionally difficult task because children must learn to connect together the relations and events that occur across multiple story events. According to van den Broek et al. (2005), this ability emerges at the end of a developmental sequence: first, young children hearing stories begin by making connections between physical events that occur close together in the story. Then, they progress to making connections between more distant and abstract events, followed by clustering events by theme. Once children are able to make these connections, they can use them to extract a story's moral or lesson, an ability requiring analogical reasoning. This developmental sequence unfolds gradually throughout early childhood, possibly making the transfer of moral messages to the real world one of the most difficult domains for learning from picture books. As a result, we might expect transferring morals to be more easily disrupted by book features, but unfortunately, little research is available in this area.

Larsen et al. (2017) tested whether animal characters with human characteristics were better for teaching transferrable morals than human characters using books intended to encourage sharing. Four- to six-year-olds were read either a commercial picture book about an anthropomorphized raccoon who learns that sharing makes her feel good or a version of the book in which the raccoon characters were replaced with humans. Both before and after reading children were given stickers and the opportunity to share some of the stickers with another child who would not have the opportunity to receive any. Children who had read the story with the human characters shared significantly more stickers after than before the book sharing. Those who read the book about anthropomorphized raccoon shared significantly fewer stickers after than before book sharing. Of interest is the finding that children who judged anthropomorphized animals as more human-like (on a categorization task using stimuli unrelated to the main picture books in the study) were those who were most likely to share after hearing the anthropomorphized animal story, suggesting that a lack of identification with the characters could have contributed to lack of transfer of the moral theme. Also, perceived similiarity with the story characters may make it more likely for the child to grasp the intent of the story and apply it to their own lives. Stories are created with the intention to communicate something and to adults the communicative intention behind a story may be straightforward, however children may need more support to be able to identify the story's intended message.

There is additional evidence that human characters may be supportive for helping children identify and extract story themes. Another study, which did not involve a transfer task, found that 4- and 5-year-olds were more likely to identify the theme of a story they were read (ask permission to join a game) if it featured human characters than if they were read the same story with rabbit characters ( Kotaman and Balci, 2017). The children who were read the human story also scored better on general story comprehension.

The available research suggests that characters that are, or are perceived as, similar to the child may enhance the extraction of story morals and their transfer to real-world situations. As with other domains, transfer of moral themes depends on children's ability to see the similarity between the situation in books and real-world situations. Realistic characters may be one way of supporting this connection. In addition, characters and contexts that differ greatly from real-world contexts may lead children to question which information in stories is realistic and should be transferred.

Concluding Comments

Adults and children regularly engage in joint reading with a variety of goals. In this review, we have focused on the use of books to teach children transferrable information about words, letters, science, problem solutions, and moral lessons. Through this review, a few important themes have emerged.

First, children's learning from a given picture book appears to be the result of an interaction between the particular features of the book, the type of information to be learned, and constraints on children's development in the areas we have outlined. As we have seen, certain features (e.g., fantasy) may be more disruptive in some domains (i.e., problem solving and moral lessons) than others (i.e., word and physics learning). Children's age and therefore developmental stage also affects what and whether they learn. For example, pictorial realism and manipulative features may be especially disruptive for younger children in word and letter learning where transfer can occur based on aligning surface-level features such as shape and color. In this domain the development of symbolic understanding may help in instances when mismatches between pictures and reality or distacting features interfere with transfer between book and real contexts. This same interaction between book features and development may not be as important in domains like problem solving and morality where children need to understand and transfer deeper features across situations rather than rely on surface-level features. As another example, fantastical contexts may be more detrimental for a child who has not yet worked out how to reliably separate the possible from the impossible because he/she is unlikely to accurately select transferrable information from fantastical stories. However, when children achieve a better grasp of this distinction, fantastical stories may not present as much of a barrier to learning in domains where fantasy serves as a good cue for lack of transferability.

Second, there is still much that we do not know about which features support learning from books. Each feature has been tested only a handful of times in a handful of contexts. While some features, such as realistic portrayals of animals, may be optimal for teaching biology, the reverse may be true for encouraging empathy for animals and nature. For example, children often use anthropomorphic reasoning to explain why trees and other elements of nature should be protected ( Gebhard et al., 2003). Different patterns of anthropomorhims effects on children's learning may also emerge at different ages ( Geerdts, 2016; Severson and Lemm, 2016). Table 1 displays the domains and book features that have been discussed and allows for identification of areas which have not been studied.

Finally, the most supportive thing adults can do to help children learn, even more than selecting high-quality books, is to have conversations with them during reading. Adults reading books with manipulative features, be they traditional or electronic, may support children by focusing less on the hands-on features and drawing attention back to content-related talk. When it comes to choosing information for transfer, adults may use generic language to signal to children that particular information is true across contexts ( Gelman et al., 2012). More generally, effective methods for supporting children in transferring conceptual information from one story context to another are to talk with children about the underlying structure of the story ( Brown et al., 1986), ask them to teach it to someone else ( Crisafi and Brown, 1986), or prompt them to explain ( Walker and Lombrozo, 2017). Other dialogic reading techniques such as asking children questions, helping them extract themes, and having them help tell the story across repeated readings may also be supportive of transfer. Parents and teachers may use our review to help select potentially educational books, but reading and talking together can make any book-reading session educational and pleasurable.

Author Contributions

All authors developed the structure and content of the manuscript. GS and AN drafted the manuscript. All authors provided edits and feedback.

Funding

This research was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Government of Canada and an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation to PG.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Role of Book Features in Young Children's Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-World Contexts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Picture books are an important source of new language, concepts, and lessons for young children. A large body of research has documented the nature of parent-child interactions during shared book reading. A new body of research has begun to investigate the features of picture books that support children's learning and transfer of that information to the real world.

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Book: illustrating children's books by Henry c. pitz 1963. 23/09

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Book: illustrating children's books by Henry c. pitz 1963. 23/09

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many discussions of the children's book origin begin with Bishop Comenius (1592-1670). "pictures are the most intelligible books that children can look upon"
contains thorough history form pre 1800's. also the structure and techniques used in picture books. feels very outdated. refers to reader as 'he'/'himself'

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Academic Article: Benefits of Motion in Animated Storybooks for Children's Visual Attention and Story Comprehension. An Eye-Tracking Study 2016 27/09

# data[].attributes.subject
Academic Article: Benefits of Motion in Animated Storybooks for Children's Visual Attention and Story Comprehension. An Eye-Tracking Study 2016 27/09

# data[].attributes.body
"motion is what attracts children's attention while looking at illustrations... This may explain why animated books resulted in better comprehension than static books"

Takacs, Z. K., & Bus, A. G. (2016). Benefits of Motion in Animated Storybooks for Children's Visual Attention and Story Comprehension. An Eye-Tracking Study. Frontiers in psychology, 7, 1591. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01591

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doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01591.

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Education, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Eötvös Loránd UniversityBudapest, Hungary; Learning Problems and Impairments, Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden UniversityLeiden, Netherlands.

² Learning Problems and Impairments, Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands.

Free PMC article

Free PMC article

doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01591.

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Education, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Eötvös Loránd UniversityBudapest, Hungary; Learning Problems and Impairments, Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden UniversityLeiden, Netherlands.

² Learning Problems and Impairments, Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands.

Abstract

The present study provides experimental evidence regarding 4-6-year-old children's visual processing of animated versus static illustrations in storybooks. Thirty nine participants listened to an animated and a static book, both three times, while eye movements were registered with an eye-tracker. Outcomes corroborate the hypothesis that specifically motion is what attracts children's attention while looking at illustrations. It is proposed that animated illustrations that are well matched to the text of the story guide children to those parts of the illustration that are important for understanding the story. This may explain why animated books resulted in better comprehension than static books.

Keywords: animation; attention; electronic storybooks; eye-tracking; motion; multimedia learning; story comprehension; vocabulary learning.

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de Jong M. T., Bus A. G. (2002). Quality of book-reading matters for emergent readers: an experiment with the same book in a regular or electronic format. J. Educ. Psychol. 94 145-155. 10.1037//0022-0663.94.1.145 - DOI

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national center for biotechnology information

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Benefits of Motion in Animated Storybooks for Children's Visual Attention and Story Comprehension. An Eye-Tracking Study - PubMed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The present study provides experimental evidence regarding 4-6-year-old children's visual processing of animated versus static illustrations in storybooks. Thirty nine participants listened to an animated and a static book, both three times, while eye movements were registered with an eye-tracker. O ...

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Tutorial with Eleanor - change of subject 22/09

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Tutorial with Eleanor - change of subject 22/09

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Had a lovely tutorial with Eleanor today:
I discussed with her that I have been doing a lot of research and found out that the book industry is evolving and changing with the digital age. E-books and audiobooks are becoming more popular, cheap and accessible however the printed book is not going anywhere. Cover designs are becoming brighter and more tactile to entice the reader; and the book as an object is becoming a more desirable and ornamental. All the sources I have read have had the same conclusion and I feel like there isn't a in-depth argument to write about here.

Because of this, I want to broaden my subject and think more about illustrated children's books and animation. I want to start to research the role and importance of children's picture books, and how they are evolving with technology. this will include children's book trailers, picture books that have been turned into animations and where there is a place for them in the future market. this will link more directly to my practice as I am also interested in where I lie as an illustrator who animates and wants to balance both practices.

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When it's acceptable to judge a book by its cover

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When it's acceptable to judge a book by its cover

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“The era of internet sales has arguably not diminished the importance of the book cover, as it now continues its role in a two-dimensional digital form, helping to identify and promote books online”

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We like to think that the inside of a book is what we care about, but most of us do judge a book by its cover. "There is nothing more fit to be looked at than the outside of a book", declared the great 19th-century satirist Thomas Love Peacock. The external appearance of a "goodly volume" was, he thought, in itself "a resource against ennui". There it is, a promise of pleasures to come. Illustrated covers can make important declarations about the nature of a book. When Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, In Our Time, appeared in Paris in 1924, the jacket was a collage of newspaper articles. The reader was being told something about the radically new, spare prose of a kind of fiction honed on journalism. Even when J.D. Salinger forbade pictorial covers for his fiction, the resultant plain silver-grey cover for the Penguin Catcher in the Rye (shared by his other works) became a kind of advertisement for the author's demanding integrity. There is no getting away from appearances.

Novels have provided an especially rich field for book cover design. This is partly because fiction so dominates the marketplace. Novels press forward, seeking to allure the passing browser. They also challenge and liberate the designer to suggest through the cover not merely what the contents of the book might be, but also what might be its special qualities, its singular imaginative space. Here the packaging of a given novelist in a consistent way, so that all of his or her works have a distinctive type of cover, can be especially effective. The author is given an oeuvre and made the creator of his or her own world.

Cover illustrations have not always been with us. Until the late 19th century, the covers of books were usually merely dust wrappers presenting publishers' information about their other wares. There were occasional exceptions. The monthly parts of Victorian novels published in instalments did sometimes come with illustrated wrappers. Dickens used green wrappers illustrated with characters and images from the relevant novels.

Some editions of the eponymously-coloured 1890s illustrated quarterly The Yellow Book came with cover illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. The publication's notoriety was assured when Oscar Wilde was arrested with a copy, bright and visible, under his arm. More influentially, children's annuals began to develop special covers; one of the earliest examples in Britain of a hardback book with a detachable decorative cover was the 1902 edition of Kipling's Just So Stories.

By 1911 a writer was complaining of a new commercial turn, publishers being "convinced that a book, like a woman, is none the worse, but rather the better, for having a good dressmaker". The illustrations that began to be used were often taken from within the book. During the 1920s, largely because of an economic boom in the US, advertising and carefully designed packaging became more common in retailing generally. Publishers began learning to promote brands and a new breed of artist coming out of art schools turned to the possibilities of commercial art. Connoisseurs and collectors sometimes treat the 1920s and 1930s as the golden age of book jackets, when the medium attracted talented artists and often reflected the currents of European modernist art. In most cases, illustration was decided, then as now, by the marketing and design departments of the publisher, with little reference to the author. There were famous exceptions. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse appeared with a jacket design by her sister, Vanessa Bell. This transforms the lighthouse into an archtypal column of light, surrounded by waves. Sadly, it is unlikely to be known to today's readers of the novel. Another unusual example of authorial design choice does remain current. For his first novel, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien drew his own cover, a stylised landscape complete with runic lettering. Even its amateur qualities seemed appropriate for this other-worldly yet peculiarly English book, and Tolkien's illustration is still used for the cover of hardback editions.

A revolution in publishing, especially of fiction, was heralded by the launching of Penguin Books by Allen Lane in 1935. Penguin expanded the market by producing cheap (though usually high-minded) books and relied on a distinctiveness of design to establish its series' identity. The first 10 titles sold at sixpence at a time when the cheapest hardbacks cost five times more. The products were simply colour coded: orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime. By today's standards, the early covers were positively austere. Only slowly were a few cautious engravings introduced to illustrate the covers, though Penguin's American subsidiary was much less restrained. In America, even highbrow paperbacks were designed to be sold in drugstores and airport bookstalls.

Allen Lane deplored American habits and in his correspondence with his US partners he angrily attacked their liking for cover illustrations. A book should have its mind on better things. After the second world war, however, Penguin hired the famous designer Jan Tschichold - older readers will subliminally know his design for the Penguin Shakespeares - who made jacket illustration a priority. Penguin novels began to have drawings on their covers by artists like Quentin Blake, David Gentleman and Paul Hogarth (the latter was responsible for Penguin's run of Graham Greene's works).

Photographs came much later at Penguin, though others had already used them. Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (1939), published by Hogarth Press, has a cover illustration derived from a photograph, taken from above, of a Berlin park. It is clearly thought to match not only that novel's setting, but also, with its opening line "I am a camera", its narrative method. In the 1960s the use of photography became widespread. In 1967 Alan Aldridge, designer of the cover for Edna O'Brien's Girls in their Married Bliss, made a joke of the company's traditional distaste for attention-grabbing illustration. The Penguin in the publisher's logo usually faced to the reader's left; in this case he had the bird turn right, as if in embarrassment at the nubile young woman and the enticing slivers of O'Brien's narrative displayed elsewhere on the cover.

O'Brien was an author given a unique identity (and, for the teenage reader, a unique allure) by photographic covers. Barry Lategun's photos, used from the late 1960s onwards, were close-ups of beautiful, youthful female torsos, disappearing tastefully into shadow - sexy yet restrained. O'Brien's novels were characteristically, after all, about girls only hesitantly discovering their sexual passions. In the 1970s, Penguin introduced the formula of using paintings for their editions of Classics, an arrangement also employed by their rivals, Oxford University Press's World's Classics series. Here the decoration is often taken directly to reflect the narrative. The Penguin Classics cover illustration for Sense and Sensibility was a portrait by Gainsborough of two handsome sisters, the one sharp-eyed, the other wistful (equivalent to Austen's Elinor and Marianne Dashwood). It suggested that an artist of the period was alive to the dichotomy explored by the novelist. The World's Classics Little Dorrit had a detail from W.P. Frith's Derby Day, a contemporary painting crowded with characters from different classes and occupations. This artistic equivalent to the novel implied a peculiarly Victorian interest in the representation of a whole society.

Rival editions of a classic sometimes seem to be making different claims via their different cover illustrations. The World's Classics Middlemarch has a portrait of a Victorian lady by Lord Leighton; the new Penguin has a view from Leckhampton Hill of Cheltenham and its surroundings, by an unknown 19th-century painter. The former presents itself as a novel about female character; the latter declares George Eliot's novel to be a panorama of provincial life. The formula of the old painting is so established that when, occasionally, non-period photographs have been used for 19th-century fiction it is with a jolting effect. A new Penguin edition of Flaubert's Madame Bovary uses a modern photo of a woman's head, though her tied-up hairstyle is difficult to date. The edition declares (too emphatically?) that the novel no period piece, but is about a woman of any time.

Modern Classics of the last couple of decades have often taken photography as the modern equivalent of 18th- or 19th-century art. A Cecil Beaton portrait of one of his fashion-conscious sisters illustrated a new edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. A photo by Bill Brandt of an unknown woman smoking was used on the cover of Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel of bohemian London, Hangover Square. In such cases, the photo is as much a classic of its times as the book.

As books are republished, designers feel the need to revamp cover designs. This might seem mere novelty packaging, but it can also say something about how the status and reception of a novel changes. Take Martin Amis's Money . The first paperback edition had the title in glitzy reflective script, as if parodying the hedonistic world-view of its narrator. Its successor had the title and author's name in embossed silver capitals over a glimpse of an enticing woman reclining on black satin sheets. It suggested tawdriness but risked being tawdry. By the end of the 1990s, the novel's cover was a collage of images: skyscrapers at night, a designer suit, part of a dollar bill. Now it was fiction as cultural criticism. In 2003 the novel became a Penguin Modern Classic, acquiring the distinctive silver-grey livery and a simple photographic cover. The illustration is a colour snap over the wing of an airliner somewhere (we presume) above the Atlantic. The satire of 1980s excess had become a timeless classic of Anglo-American relations. It has, as academics say, entered the canon.

Penguin's original collages for Milan Kundera's novels once seemed utterly appropriate. The combination of photograph and engraving, the concealed heads and fragmented bodies (created by Polish designer and film-maker Andrzej Klimowski) seemed true to the fiction's origins in Eastern bloc Czechoslovakia. But with Kundera's move to France and the collapse of communism, the new Faber editions use Kundera's own playful sketches, emphasising the comic and idiosyncratic aspects of the fiction. Similarly, Peter Bentley's 1920s/30s graphic design for the Penguin Evelyn Waugh gave them a special identity but also set Waugh apart as an anachronism. New Penguin Modern Classic editions employ period illustrations, some from posters or magazines, and present Waugh as the wholly modern satirist that he was.

Some may, like Allen Lane, be unswayed by an enticing cover, but most of us will go on being happy to let a picture persuade us into a purchase.

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When it's acceptable to judge a book by its cover

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We like to think that the inside of a book is what we care about, but most of us do judge a book by its cover. "There is nothing more fit to be looked at than the outside of a book", declared the great 19th-century satirist Thomas Love Peacock.

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Controversy over racist 2009 book cover 'Liar'

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Controversy over racist 2009 book cover 'Liar'

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One example highlighting the importance of the book cover to represent the content of the book. As well as the psychological aspect of why people pick up books. - could look into who is picking these books up - personality type, gender, race, class.

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Australian author Justine Larbalestier has won a battle with her American publishers to feature a black girl on the cover of her new book, after the original jacket featuring a white girl provoked controversy from bloggers and commentators across the internet.

The original cover design

Larbalestier's new novel, Liar, is about a short-haired black girl called Micah, but the advance reading copies sent out by Bloomsbury Children's Books used a photograph of a long-haired white girl on its jacket, prompting a wave of criticism. "It's bad enough to misrepresent the character in other ways, but changing the race on the cover of the book just seems wrong," blogged a librarian. "I am appropriately stricken. And outraged, nauseous, flabbergasted ... I wish I could say I can't imagine what they were thinking, but in fact I do have a guess. I just can't imagine why they thought no one would notice," wrote a children's book editor.

On second thoughts ...

"I was very upset. Both my agent and I requested that it be changed," said Larbalestier, who was flooded with messages of support after laying out her concerns about the cover on her blog. "Are the big publishing houses really only in the business of selling books to white people?" she wrote. "That's not a very sustainable model if true."

Bloomsbury has now bowed to the pressure and will publish the hardback of Liar this October featuring a black girl. The publisher told US trade magazine Publishers Weekly that it regretted that its "original creative direction for Liar - which was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator's complex psychological makeup - has been interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character's ethnicity". Australian publication - with a text-focused jacket - is also lined up for October, but UK rights in Liar have not yet sold.

Larbalestier said she was "very impressed" with "how quickly and decisively" Bloomsbury responded, and that she was "very happy" with the new look for Liar, which follows the story of Micah, for whom lying is second nature until her boyfriend Zach dies. "I was hopeful that people would notice and speak up and that if they were loud enough that there'd be a change for the paperback edition. People spoke up sooner and louder than I dreamed. I'm extremely grateful," she said. "I think the new cover is gorgeous. While it's true that the model is not exactly as I imagined Micah (she looks quite a lot like the American basket ball player Alana Beard) she is much, much closer than the previous model."

But Larbalestier believes the issues of "whitewashing" of covers, ghettoising of books by people of colour, and low expectations for these books are industry-wide. In 2004, Ursula Le Guin asked why "even when [my characters] aren't white in the text, they are white on the cover ... I have fought many cover departments on this issue, and mostly lost. But please consider that 'what sells' or 'doesn't sell' can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If black kids, Hispanics, Indians both Eastern and Western, don't buy fantasy - which they mostly don't - could it be because they never see themselves on the cover?"

Larbalestier, also the author of How to Ditch Your Fairy and the Magic or Madness trilogy, agreed that the idea that "black books don't sell" could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. "I don't think anyone can know until books with black faces on them get a big marketing push. You can't tell anything if such books get very little promotion," she

said. "I think the belief that white people won't buy books about black people is a widely held one, but I do think the furore over the cover of Liar is causing people to rethink that. And to ask themselves 'if it is true, what can we do to change it?'". She urged readers to start buying books by "people of colour", recommending Coe Booth's

Kendra and M Sindy Felin's Touching Snow.

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Bloomsbury backs down over book cover race row

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Australian author Justine Larbalestier has won a battle with her American publishers to feature a black girl on the cover of her new book, after the original jacket featuring a white girl provoked controversy from bloggers and commentators across the internet.

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Paratext is all the other material supplied on a book by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers. Eg. publishing info, barcode & ISBN, cover image. “One example of controversy surrounding paratext is the case of the 2009 young adult novel Liar, which was initially published with an image of a white girl on the cover, although the narrator of the story was identified in the text as black.”

Genette states "More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold." It is "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that ... is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it".

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No spine or back, no texture/embossing. This puts a greater strain on the design. Have to work in monochrome for kindle. Also differences in DPI 72 vs 300. And colour RGB vs CMYK.

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What's the difference between eBook and print covers? -

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What's the difference between eBook and print covers? It sounds like bad 80s stand-up material, doesn't it? Thankfully I'm not creative enough to come up with a suitably average punchline. Lucky you . Coloured or Monochrome The look on Dorothy's face when she walked into the technicolour world of Oz said it all - colour is bangin' .

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Journal of illustration. - A thing to hold: The visual language of the book form

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Journal of illustration. - A thing to hold: The visual language of the book form

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“If the physical form of the book is so related to the visual language of the book, how does this relate to a future of e-books, online publications and social media? Going back to that question of what is a book, what does it mean for something to exist as a book in a digital situation, where the object has no weight in your hands, the material is not tactile and the binding is data rather than glue or thread. If you remove these elements is it still a book?”

“In a digital world a place remains for the physical artefact, and yet as our relationship with reading changes, opportunities for digital answers to the book are opening up.”

Also talks about colouring books.

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Book: Illustration: a visual history by Steven Heller, Seymour cheats. 23/09

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Book: Illustration: a visual history by Steven Heller, Seymour cheats. 23/09

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p228 "when or where the first illustrated children's book was published is not exactly clear" many historians agree is was the mid 18th century in England. The Brothers Grimm and the printing press popularised children's books (to accompany the text).

"the key to a vast majority of children's illustrations is placing the viewer-the child-in the scene, sometimes through a metaphorical or allegorical stand-in."
"surrealism in children's books isn't all that different from surrealism in adult audiences, but children somehow embrace the absurd more readily, happily, and with a greater sense of wonder" - link this to contemporary abstract/ surrealist art? eg. Simons book, or 1845 struwwelpeter.
Following the post war baby boom, publishers reconsidered their audiences and took more risks with themes, layouts and techniques. eg. the noisy book by Margaret wise brown.
during the 1950'd the us codified standards of legibility for all children's books.
Leo Leonni -" typography should be seen and not heard, because reading is functional and should not be tampered with" he believed that "the picture is the story, the type conveys the narrative".
recently, more licence has been permissible because, due to budget cuts, librarians have become less dominant in the market and children's book publishers want to appeal to a wider range of consumers. Many illustrators now see type as part of their art now and have become more concerned with its appearance than its meaning.
it took a while for expressive illustration to make its way into children's picture books because adults were concerned it would be confusing or distracting however it is just a strategy to keep them interested.

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“a cartiridge people study found that 72% of people still prefer to read a hard copy of a book as opposed to using an e-reader, tablet or listening to an audiobook”

Why did people read more in 2020? More spare time due to isolating or working from home, also more access too e/audiobooks.

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Home > Information > Blog > World Book Day Statistics: How The UK Is Enjoying Books In 2021

2021-02-23 16:01:00

As part of World Book Day 2021, Cartridge People has been finding out more about the nation's reading habits and how books are enjoyed in modern-day Britain.

From the most popluar children's books to the literary works that inspired Oscar winners, we've put together the below infographic which also outlines a Cartridge People study* that found that:

One in five Brits now takes in a 'book' on a screen or e-reader

41% of people in the UK spend less than an hour a week reading or listening to books

11% of 18-34 year olds admitted to reading for more than 14 hours a week

33% stated that they were reading more than they were in February 2020

One in 10 people in the 18-44 age group would now prefer to listen to an audiobook

Over 75% of women opt to read the book itself as opposed to a digital or audio version

Ever wanted to know what would take longer; watching Game Of Thrones or reading A Song Of Ice and Fire? Our World Book Day infographic will provide you with a host of information to mark the occasion in 2021.

*Study based on 1,000 people, carried out in February 2021. Dataset available on request.

If you would like to add our infographic to your website you can use the code provided below:

Win An Amazon Tablet In Our World Book Day Competition

We're giving away an Amazon Fire 7 Tablet to celebrate World Book Day 2021. To be in with a chance of winning, simply follow Cartridge People on Instagram and comment on our World Book Day competition post telling us your favourite book. We'll announce the winner on Monday, 8th March 2021.

Terms and Conditions apply.

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World Book Day Statistics: How The UK Is Enjoying Books In 2021

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Home > Information > Blog > World Book Day Statistics: How The UK Is Enjoying Books In 2021 2021-02-23 16:01:00 As part of World Book Day 2021, Cartridge People has been finding out more about the nation's reading habits and how books are enjoyed in modern-day Britain.

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The general consensus is that while the book publishing industry did take a dip when covid hit, it bounced back and continued to grow

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While many people and businesses suffered in 2020, book publishers only experienced a minor dip, and actually showed gains in many areas.

Being quarantined indoors had people looking to the old stand-by - books - for a way to beat fear and boredom.

Readers stepped up in 2021, with avid readers significantly increasing their literary intake.

The latest book and reading statistics show how the industry is rebounding after a turbulent year.

Book Sales Statistics

While many people and businesses suffered during the global pandemic, book publishers thrived.

Publisher's Weekly reports that print book sales rose more than 8.9% since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Readers also stepped up last year, with avid readers significantly increasing their literary intake.

Print Book Sales Growth Rate Since the Start of the Pandemic

Book Sales Numbers

People are cracking spines and flipping pages as book sales increase!

Books publishing statistics show increases across the board.

Women account for nearly 80 percent of fiction sales in the US, UK, and Canada.

Young adult fiction sales jumped 30.7% in 2021.

Adult fiction sales increased 25.5% in 2021.

Children's fiction sales rose 9.6% in 2021.

eBook revenue was up 11.7% in 2020 over 2019 figures.

In October 2021, eBook revenue reached $84 million (AAP).

Today, eBooks make up 21% of total book sales.

Amazon's Kindle Unlimited paid out $39.8 million in royalties in October 2021.

Bookstore sales in 2021 were approximately $9 billion, up from $6.5 billion in 2020.

In the first four months of 2022, bookstore sales are down 23% compared to the same period in 2019.

Bookstore sales peaked at $17.17 billion in 2007 but have been steadily decreasing ever since.

Book Sales Data

A look at the publishing industry reveals a disparity between authors and consumers.

700,000 to 1,000,000 new book titles appear every year. However, half of these are self-published and only sell a handful of copies.

50% of all published books are related to education and science.

Book Sales Statistics By Year

Although there is obviously a positive trend in the book market after the pandemic, the overall trend is a little complicated.

A look at US book sales statistics by year and book sales figures by year shows how sales have dipped.

Book sales over time statistics show that reading is losing ground to other forms of entertainment year after year - unit sales are increasing but overall revenue is dropping.

Book Sales Numbers and Volume in the United States By Year

(Source: Statista)

Global Book Sales Statistics 2022

The biggest worldwide players in the field of publishing include Pearson PLC, Hachette Livre, Bertelsmann, Grupo Planeta, and the China South Publishing and Media Group.

Asia and North America are the leaders when it comes to production, with both holding a 34% share of the publishing industry.

The 2021 global book market was valued at $138.35 billion.

By 2030 this number is expected to be around $163.89 billion.

A global average of 16.44 Euros is spent per capita on print and audiobooks.

$12.32 billion was generated through global eBook publishing.

The publishing industry employs 315,731 people around the world.

1.5 million new titles published globally in 2021.

eBook and audiobook sales increased by more than 30% since 2020.

Households with incomes of $75,000 and above read more than households with incomes of less than $30,000.

Book Sales in the United States

Book publishing has shrunk but remains a cornerstone of American business.

The pandemic drove an increase in book sales that hopefully will continue into the post-pandemic economy.

Book store sales have gone up in 2021 due to the lockdowns and the COVID epidemic.

825.7 million print books were sold in the US in 2021, up from 757.9 million in 2020.

The U.S. book industry generated nearly $25 billion in 2019.

Approximately 2,600 different companies make up the U.S. publishing industry.

The U.S. books market is expected to generate $30 billion by 2025.

Estimated growth of the North American book market (2018-2028).

Online Book Sales Statistics

In 2020, US books and magazines eCommerce sales value was around $18.6 billion (including audiobooks and eBooks). A $4 billion or 27.40% increase compared to 2019 ($14.6 billion).

Online book sales in the United States totaled $16.7 billion in 2021.

The global online book services market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.8% between 2020 and 2027. Market size is expected to expand from $18.8 billion in 2020 to $27.8 billion in 2027.

In 2019, data from 29 national organizations of European publishers revealed that 23% of books were sold online in Europe.

Amazon Book Sales Statistics

When Jeff Bezos started Amazon out of his garage is 1994, he sold books and only books.

Amazon's first tagline was "The World's Largest Bookstore."

While book sales are a fraction of its overall revenue today, Amazon is still the biggest seller of books online. Amazon remains guarded about its exact book sales statistics, but from what we could find:

10% of Amazon's revenue came from book sales in 2021.

65% of all new book sales online in print and digital formats are made on Amazon.

41% of new print book sales are made on Amazon.

67% of all eBook sales are made on Amazon.

Book Sales by Genre Statistics

Readers of all ages love a good story, especially if it's true!

Below we compare 2021 book sales with 2020 numbers.

Adult nonfiction sold 322,564 units, a 4.4% increase over last year.

Adult fiction sold 174,190 units, a 25.5% increase over last year.

Juvenile nonfiction sold 75,059 units, a 6.2% decrease over last year.

Juvenile fiction sold 201,868 units, a 9.6% increase over last year.

Young adult fiction sold 30,974 units, a 30.7% increase over last year.

Young adult nonfiction sold 4,316 units, an 8.3% increase over last year.

Hardcover books sold 249,788 units, a 10.3% increase over last year.

Trade paperback books sold 457,218 units, a 9.3% increase over last year.

Mass market paperback books sold 38,215 units, a 3.1% decrease over last year.

Children's board books sold 49,820 units last year, a 13.2% increase over last year.

Romance novels are the bestselling fiction genre ($1.44 billion).

Religious and inspiration books are the bestselling nonfiction genre ($720 million).

Comic Book Sales Statistics

Comic books - and their more distinguish counterpart, graphic novels - saw a massive increase during the pandemic, especially in anime comic books.

The beginning of the pandemic meant record number of comics sold, same trend continued in 2021.

Poetry Book Sales Statistics

Poetry was always a slow-selling book category until the rise of social media.

The short format and immediacy of social media platforms are ideal for online poets, and poet books have enjoyed a sales boost in recent years.

1.3 million volumes of poetry were sold in 2018.

66% of poetry book buyers are under the age of 34.

28 million adults read poetry in 2017.

Poets.org saw an increase of one million visitors last year.

Children's Book Sales Statistics

Children's book publishing sales show modest gains in recent years.

$2.6 billion was generated by children's book publishing industry in 2022.

Children's book sales have are expected to increase 2.2% in 2022.

Children's book sales have increased 3.3% since 2017.

Book Publishing Statistics

Books used to be one of the most popular pastimes in the world.

Then came films and television, followed by video games, the Internet, LARPing, etc.

Competing for consumers' dwindling attention spans is a tricky business!

But books aren't going anywhere.

However, the way they're being formatted and distributed has radically changed over the last few decades.

Introduced over a decade ago, eReaders offered consumers a new digital format for reading books. These digital readers allowed book lovers to:

buy their favorite titles for less

take them anywhere

and change the font size and typeface

The popularity of eReaders seems to have leveled off in recent years, but Statista still projects the number of eReader users to grow from 950.5 million in 2019to 1.11 billion by next year.

Readers can store thousands of eBooks in their eReaders and mobile devices.

Print-on-Demand Statistics

Another big change in the publishing industry is the growth of print-on-demand technology.

The technology avoids the big production runs of off-set printing and in favor of books printed one copy at a time.

This technology has allowed authors around the world to publish their own books without the need of traditional publishing houses.

As a result of print-on-demand technology, the number of book titles has increased from 2.3 million book titles published in 2013 to approximately 4 million new books being published in 2021, with nearly half of those titles coming from self-published authors.

The print-on-demand industry has grown 12% over the past 4 years.

A typical self-published, print-on-demand book sells less than 200 physical copies.

The popularity of print-on-demand book publishing is expected to impact market growth.

Book publishers have jumped on the digital bandwagon, publisher statistics show, embracing e-books and audiobooks as emerging technologies for storytelling. But traditional "dead tree" editions of printed books are still the most popular format with readers.

Most Popular Book Genre Statistics

Everybody loves a good story well told, but certain types of books have a larger readership than others.

Nonfiction outsells fiction by a margin of nearly 3-to-2. In 2017, nonfiction revenues totaled $6.18 billion compared to $4.3 billion in fiction sales, according to Penguin Random House.

The Bestselling Nonfiction Title of 2022

The bestselling children's book of last year was Dav Pilkey's "Dog Man: Mothering Heights.

In fact, USA TODAY reported "Dog Man: Mothering Heights" was the bestselling book in all categories.

The second bestselling book last year was Kristin Hannah's epic love story, "The Four Winds." Coming in third was "American Marxism," Mark Levin's political tome.

One thing is certain; diehard readers have their favorite genres and they stick to them.

Romance novels enjoy an audience of voracious readers; they buy a lot of books and they read a lot!

Last year, romance novels raked in $1.44 billion.

According to Query Tracker, young adult is the most popular fiction category, followed by:

Romance placed 9 out of 10 on the list.

QT's most popular nonfiction genres are:

memoir

self-help

narrative

religion/spirituality

cultural/social issues

biographies

Proactive Writer says the bestselling print book categories on Amazon are:

The bestselling eBook categories on Amazon are:

The genre fiction categories that generate the most sales are:

The bestselling audiobook genres are:

Quick fact: thrillers are the bestselling genre of audiobooks.

Comprehensive overview of the most popular book genres in 2021.

Audio Book Statistics

Audiobook sales generated $1.3 billion in revenue in 2020.

Global audiobooks revenue (subscriptions to digital audiobook services and single purchases combined) was estimated to be at $4.8 billion in 2021. This number is projected to reach $9.3 billion by 2026.

Between 2010 and 2020 the number of audiobooks published increased from approximately 6,000 to more than 71,000 per year - this is a 1083.33% increase in ten years!

30% of readers aged 18-to-29 listened to an audiobook in the last year, compared to only 12% of readers aged 65 and older.

An average of 23% of American readers also listen to audiobooks.

25% of women in the US listen to audiobooks, up from 22% in 2018

22% of men in the US listen to audiobooks, up from 19% in 2018

12% of senior citizens in the US listen to audiobooks

20% of US consumers listened to an audiobook last year

138 million audiobooks were borrowed from libraries in 2021

Smartphones are the most popular devices for listening to audiobooks

Literature and fiction is the leading audiobook genre in the US

56% of US audiobook listeners are under the age of 45, a 4% increase from last year

46% of US adults say they've listened to an audiobook, a 2% increase over last year

Audiobook listeners listened to an average of 8.1 books in 2020, up from 6.8 in 2019.

eBook Statistics

22% of US readers use e-readers, like a Kindle or a Nook, to read e-books.

191 million eBooks were sold in 2020.

Over $1 billion was spent on eBooks in 2020.

eBook readers spend between $19 and $25 each year on eBooks.

Book Reading Statistics

Reading is fundamental and the latest book reading statistics in the world bear this out.

Even though reading habits have changed drastically over the years, the joy and benefits of reading remain constant.

A statistic on reading from Gallup suggests reading is losing popularity as an American pastime. But benefits of reading statistics show the power and importance of reading.

Reading exercises your "brain muscles."

According to book reading statistics in the US compiled by Expert Editor suggest reading 30 pages - or for 30 minutes - per day can:

Stimulate neural pathways

Keep the brain active and elastic

Decrease mental decline in the elderly by 32%

Improve memory

Promote new synapse growth

2022 Reading Statistics: A Banner Year For Readers

Information and statistics provided by researchers at Pew Research and Publisher's Weekly confirm that people are reading more than ever.

But that doesn't mean more people were reading.

It means people who were already readers read more.

Why do people read more?

One of the prime reasons was the rise of homeschooling.

Parents needed to read to children, from board books for pre-readers to content for first readers attempting to sound out words. With school libraries on lockdown, caregivers searched online for what they needed to promote literacy skills in their children.

But there are other factors to consider when looking at the recent years book market. People simply had more free time to read. They also had more access via e-readers and eBooks.

In addition, there was an increasing desire among American families for words of comfort and understanding. Regardless of age, race, or household income, people across the nation sought information, entertainment, or distraction last year.

Books had what they needed.

Reading Statistics Across The Globe

Are books still popular? Regardless of age or country of origin, readers around the globe sought to enrich their lives through reading stats, data, facts, and diverse topics. Stats on reading suggest people are returning to the simple pleasure of reading.

Just over half of the UK adult population reads regularly for pleasure.

Senior citizens in the UK spend an average of 5 hours a week reading.

UK readers under 25 read an average of 2.4 hours per week.

28% of China's total 2016 publishing sales were e-books.

Print still accounts for the bulk of total units sold.

E-book sales are strongest in Korea (80.1%), Brazil (54.6%), and Norway (29.1%).

Asians are among the most passionate readers on the planet.

Reading Statistics in the United States

America is great ... except for reading.

According to Pew Research, one of the prime reasons children in the United States hover near the middle of the pack in global literacy skills is that there are not enough adult readers enkindling that love of words in the next generation.

The often-cited - yet sketchy - NOP World Culture Score Index is a global survey that places the U.S. in 22nd place in reading statistics.

According to the NOP, the average U.S. adult reads approximately five hours a week, while top readers in India, Thailand, China, Philippines, and Egypt clock between 7.5 - 10.5 hours per week reading.

Do Americans today read more or less than 20 years ago?

In 2017, Americans read an average of 16.8 minutes per day (not including work and school materials). This is a 26% decrease from 2005 when Americans read an average of 22.8 minutes per day.

The average American reads 12 books a year, according to Pew Research, but that number is deceiving.

The median number of books read per year in the United States is four, meaning half the country reads less than 4 books per year.

A Closer Look At United States Reading Statistics

It's a fact - reading makes you smart and keeps your mind sharp regardless of age.

There are a number of life benefits that stem from reading! Improve your life by reading something more challenging than a restaurant menu!

14% of US adults - 32 million Americans - cannot read.

27% of US adults didn't read one book in 2015.

Total US newspaper circulation fell 11% between 2016 and 2017, the 28th consecutive year of decline.

While traditional paper editions of newspapers continue to decline in per day readership, the popularity of online newspapers is growing. The New York Times saw a 47% increase in digital subscriptions in 2017, while The Wall Street Journal saw a 23% rise in digital readership.

18% of total US book sales in 2016 were digital.

Adult fiction and nonfiction generated $5.1 billion in revenue in 2018.

The average US household spends $118 on reading annually, including newspapers and magazines.

Reading statistics and reading habits in America.

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Reading skills and reading gains develop at all grade levels and ages.

Reading Statistics and Students

Reading acquisition is one of the more important life skills children must learn.

Children typically start to read around age six or seven.

Books expose children to 50% more words than primetime television.

65% of all U.S. fourth grade students in 2013 scored "below proficient" in reading skills.

35% of fourth-graders could not read at grade level.

The latest reading statistics show younger children reading more.

Reading Statistics and High School Students

More than 60% of high school seniors read below grade level.

27% of high school seniors cannot read at a "basic" level.

Teenagers from book-loving homes had 42% better vocabulary grades than those that didn't.

Reading proficiency scores for American high school students haven't improved since the 1970s.

First-through-fifth graders weren't the only young students reading more in 2020. Middle graders and high schoolers read more during the pandemic as well!

Books and College Students

2020 was the year U.S. middle-grade students and high schoolers dusted off the reference books and "worked from home".

Reading Statistics and Elementary School Students

Reading acquisition is one of the more important life skills children must learn, according to the latest reading in America statistics.

Children typically start to read around age six or seven.

Books expose children to 50% more words than primetime television.

65% of all U.S. fourth grade students in 2013 scored "below proficient" in reading skills.

35% of fourth-graders could not read at grade level.

Child Reading Statistics

While the benefits of reading to young children are well documented, a deeper look at the benefits of reading to children statistics shows how reading continues to benefit children well into adulthood.

Children's Literacy Gets A COVID Stimulus

As schools closed and parents taught from home, demand for juvenile nonfiction titles rose.

Reading to kids before they can read on their own helps young readers navigate the parts of a book, like the table of contents, index, and copyright page.

Statistics On Reading To Your Child

More than one child education study suggests a child with access to age-appropriate content shows achievement in all areas of course work.

A look at statistics about reading shows how the pandemic lockdown helped boost overall reading behaviors among children.

According to Publisher's Weekly, two of the best-selling books of last year were Big Preschool Work (790,000 copies) and My First Learn-to-Write Workbook (703,000 copies), underscoring just how much homeschooling of young children was undertaken by parents or a family member last year.

Getting kids into books while they're young - even before they can read - is an essential part of early childhood development. Mothers and fathers who read to their children inspire a lifelong love of reading. In turn, these children will pass the reading bug on to their own children when they're grown.

Exposing kids to data and facts can prompt questions in children of any age. This is an often overlooked aspect of reading. Think about content for kids. One fact read by a third-grade child can spark a lifelong love of education!

Reading to young children is vital for improving literacy skills. Listening to parents talk can help improve comprehension skills, word association, and overall childhood literacy.

Reading and success in life statistics suggest children develop better reading skills and reading comprehension as adults when they are read to as kids. Students that develop good reading habits have an easier time hitting education-level goals as they move through grade school.

Here are some numbers about reading to your child:

Benefits of Reading Statistics

It's a fact - reading makes you smart and keeps your mind sharp regardless of age. There are a number of life benefits that stem from reading! Improve your life by reading something more challenging than a restaurant menu!

Crack a book and you might just avoid a trip to the doctor's office! Reader statistics show that readers are healthier in both body and mind.

People who read regularly are kinder, according to a Kingston University study on reading facts and statistics.

Reading comedic fiction increases your empathy toward others.

Children who read for pleasure have greater vocabulary growth and cognitive skills.

Reading keeps you out of jail. Sixty percent of all inmates cannot read. Prisoners that learn to read have a 16% chance of returning to prison, compared to a 70% recidivism rate for inmates who never learn to read.

Reading is more important for a child's cognitive development than their socio-economic upbringing or their parent's education.

19% of readers say spending time with a book makes them feel less lonely.

People with high literacy skills report a stronger sense of belonging to society and are more likely to trust others.

Pleasure readers have higher levels of self-esteem and a great ability to cope with difficult situations.

Reading for as little as six minutes slows heart rates and eases tension.

Reading is 300% better at reducing stress than walking, and 700% better than playing video games.

Reading reduces stress by 68 percent, more so than listening to music, having a cup of tea, or taking a walk.

Reading for pleasure helps prevent stress, depression, and dementia.

Reading fiction is a way to improve language development and vocabulary as well as brain connectivity and function.

Lifelong readers have lower rates of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia than their peers.

50% of people who read before bed report better sleep than non-readers.

Less than 50% of U.S. citizens read novels, short stories, plays, and poetry.

Top Three Bestselling Books of All-Time

1. The Bible - five billion copies (registered by Guinness World Records in 2021)

2. The Works of Mao Tse-tung - 820 million copies

3. The Harry Potter Series - 500 million copies

Connecting with Readers

While it may seem old-fashioned compared to modern entertainments like virtual reality gaming, reading still offers the most immersive and intimate entertainment experience.

Authors put emotions and ideas that exist solely in their minds into words. Readers consume those words and experience the same thoughts and emotions.

You're inside the brain of another person! It doesn't get more intimate or immersive than that!

Print book sales figures have improved and unit sales now consistently surpass 650 million per year.

825.75 million print books were sold in 2021.

Print book sales have increased approximately 9% year-over-year since 2012.

65% of US adults read a print book in 2021.

Book sales generated $27.9 billion in revenue in 2021.

There are 4,100 independent bookstores in the United States.

Readers find what they need on printed pages!

A Book Is Brain Food

Reading is fundamental and the latest book statistics bear this out. Even though reading habits have changed drastically over the years, the joy and benefits of reading remain constant.

Facts About Reading

Check out these interesting facts about reading! Reading facts is where it's at!

Bibliosmia is the experience of enjoying that "new book smell."

The printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg between 1440-50 in Germany.

The Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1455 in Mainz, Germany, is often cited as one of the first books.

Several books in the Harvard Houghton Library are bound in human flesh.

"Codex Leicester" or the "Hammer Codex" by Leonardo Da Vinci was sold at auction to Bill Gates for $30.8 million in 1994.

Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876) was the first novel written on a typewriter.

Reading brings generations of families together!

Further Reading:
Rob Errera

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Eye-Popping Book and Reading Statistics [2022]

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While many people and businesses suffered in 2020, book publishers only experienced a minor dip, and actually showed gains in many areas. Being quarantined indoors had people looking to the old stand-by - books - for a way to beat fear and boredom. Readers stepped up in 2021, with avid readers significantly increasing their literary intake.

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Graph showing how what we spent our free time doing changed due to covid 

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Graph showing how what we spent our free time doing changed due to covid 

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“Across the general adult population, there was an increase in the time spent on entertainment, socialising and other free time by 44 minutes a day. By far the most popular activity in this broad category was watching TV or streaming videos, which took up 2 hours and 53 minutes a day on average. Other activities in this category were far less popular: we spent 28 minutes a day reading, 26 minutes playing games (including computer games), and 16 minutes a day contacting friends and family via phone or messaging services”

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Interesting gov stats on how people spent their time during the pandemic 

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Interesting gov stats on how people spent their time during the pandemic 

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– lower income families increased working hrs. higher income stayed the same or lowered working hrs.  “The reduction in travel time was greater for those in paid employment, at 1 hour and 19 minutes a day, with those living in households with higher incomes making more substantial time savings than those on lower incomes” this will affect free time and therefore reading habits. Is class relevant?

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During lockdown, those with the lowest household incomes increased their total time in paid work, working a similar amount of time outside of the home as they did in 2014 to 2015; this may indicate that that those in lower income households are in occupations that cannot be undertaken from home.

People with the highest household incomes continued to work the same amount on average, as they made a greater switch towards homeworking time.

There was a substantial reduction in the amount of time we spent travelling, compared with 2014 to 2015; this was less pronounced for people in households with lower incomes, who saw a smaller increase in time spent on a range of leisure activities when compared with households with higher incomes.

The gap in unpaid work (activities such as childcare, adult care, housework and volunteering) between men and women reduced slightly during lockdown but remained large, at 1 hour and 7 minutes a day; this was a result of women reducing time spent doing unpaid work by 20 minutes a day, while men increased their time on this activity by 22 minutes.

People with children in the household spent 35% more time on average providing childcare during lockdown than five years ago, although this varied considerably depending on the age of children; the introduction of restrictions coincided with those aged over 60 years reducing the time spent providing childcare by 90%, which equated to 1 hour and 44 minutes a week.

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2. How the general population spent their time

Figure 1: We are spending less time on travelling and work and more on free time, gardening and DIY, and sleep and rest

Minutes of main activity a day for adults aged 18 years and over, 2014 to 2015 for the UK and 28 March to 26 April 2020 for Great Britain

Notes:

1. The categories are defined in the Glossary section.

2. Only things that people refer to as their main activity at any given point are shown in this figure.

Data download
Recent lockdown measures coincided with a substantial reduction in the amount of time we spent travelling, with the average adult spending 1 hour and 6 minutes less a day either commuting or using transport in general. The reduction in travel time was greater for those in paid employment, at 1 hour and 19 minutes a day, with those living in households with higher incomes making more substantial time savings than those on lower incomes.

Across the general adult population, there was an increase in the time spent on entertainment, socialising and other free time by 44 minutes a day. By far the most popular activity in this broad category was watching TV or streaming videos, which took up 2 hours and 53 minutes a day on average. Other activities in this category were far less popular: we spent 28 minutes a day reading, 26 minutes playing games (including computer games), and 16 minutes a day contacting friends and family via phone or messaging services. In our Coronavirus and the social impacts on Great Britain: 14 May 2020 release, 71.3% of those aged 16 years and over reported watching films or using streaming services to cope with lockdown, while 78.7% said that staying in touch with friends and family remotely was also helping.

There was also a substantial increase in the time spent gardening and doing DIY by 147% to 39 minutes a day, and on average we spent an extra 18 minutes sleeping or resting.

During lockdown, there was also a fall of 1 hour and 24 minutes a week in the time spent eating, drinking and engaging in activities such as getting ready to go out; going to cafés, pubs, restaurants; and getting a haircut. During lockdown, we spent 1 hour and 23 minutes a day eating and drinking, which includes eating takeaway food and drinking alcohol, and just under an hour a day cooking or doing the washing up.
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3. The gap in unpaid work between men and women

Figure 2: The gap in unpaid work between men and women remains large at over an hour per day

Minutes of main activity a day by sex for adults aged 18 years and over, 2014 to 2015 for the UK and 28 March to 26 April 2020 for Great Britain

Notes:

1. The categories are defined in the Glossary section.

2. Only things that people refer to as their main activity at any given point are shown in this figure.

3. Some categories are not shown in this figure but can be found in the reference tables.

Data download
Before lockdown, the gap in unpaid work between men and women - which includes unpaid childcare and other unpaid work such as housework and volunteering - was 1 hour and 50 minutes a day, with men instead spending more time engaging in paid work and travel.

Compared to 2014 to 2015, men reduced their work and travel time by 1 hour and 37 minutes a day on average during lockdown, while for women this reduced by 1 hour and 2 minutes. The time spent doing unpaid work rose by 22 minutes for men and fell by 20 minutes for women and, taken together, these effects reduced the 1 hour and 50 minute gap in unpaid work to 1 hour and 7 minutes a day.

For parents and other adults responsible for young people, unpaid childcare accounts for a substantial amount of unpaid work. The effect of shielding and social distancing coincided with those aged 60 years and over reducing the time spent providing childcare by 90%; this equated to 1 hour and 44 minutes less a week on average, with the vast majority of the decrease attributable to older women. Similarly, those without children reduced their childcare by an average of 1 hour and 13 minutes a week - perhaps reflecting the effect of friends and extended family being unable to provide support to parents.

This meant that individuals living with children spent 35% longer on average providing childcare, which included helping out with homework. Men increased their amount of childcare by 58% between 2014 to 2015 and March to April 2020, but they still undertook 15 minutes a day less unpaid childcare than women. However, any change in this category greatly depended on the age of the child: the amount of time spent caring for a child aged under 8 years in the household was 4 hours and 5 minutes for women and 2 hours 50 minutes for men.

Women increased their paid homeworking time and decreased their paid work time away from home by the same amounts between 2014 to 2015 and March to April 2020. This meant the overall paid work time for women remained the same. Considering both the changes in paid and unpaid work, the gap in entertainment, socialising and other free time between men and women reduced from 29 minutes to 7 minutes per day in March to April 2020.
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4. Changes across different income groups

Figure 3: Those on monthly household incomes up to £1,700 were more likely to work away from home and had no more free time than in 2014 to 2015

Difference in minutes of main activity a day by net household income group for adults aged 18 years and over, 2014 to 2015 for the UK and 28 March to 26 April 2020 for Great Britain

Notes:

1. The categories are defined in the Glossary section.

2. Only things that people refer to as their main activity at any given point are shown in this figure.

Data download
In 2014 to 2015, adults living in households on lower incomes spent less time working from home, and this was also the case during lockdown. Those with a household income up to £1,700 a month increased their average time working from home by 3 hours and 2 minutes a week, while for those earning over £3,301 it increased by 7 hours and 37 minutes a week. This resulted in a much smaller reduction in the total time spent travelling and working compared with those on higher incomes.

Key workers are more likely to have to continue going in to work, and as reported in our Coronavirus and keyworkers in the UK release 30.5% of employees in the bottom three income deciles (earning up to £1,450 per month) were considered as key workers, while for those in the top three income deciles (earning over £3,250 per month) only 26.4% were considered key workers. Additionally, from our latest Household income inequality release, a larger proportion of households at the bottom of the income distribution are supported by a self-employed individual, who would not be eligible for the furlough scheme and may be less likely to stop work.

Those living in households with middle incomes (between £15,000 and £30,000) were most likely to have been furloughed, with 15% of them reporting so by the 10 days ending 20 April 2020, according to the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN). In contrast, 5% of those with a household income up to £15,000 and 6% of those with incomes above £30,000 had reported being furloughed up to that same period.

As travel and paid working time fell less for those with lower household incomes, this group only saw a small change to their entertainment, socialising and other free time - compared with a rise of just under 50 minutes a day for those on higher incomes. Those on higher incomes also saw a greater rise in time spent sleeping and resting as well as gardening and DIY. There were also differences in exercise time both before and after the lockdown, with the average duration of an exercise session similar across income groups, but those on higher incomes exercised more frequently during the week.
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Travelling and transport (for example, walking and driving)

Travelling and transport includes travelling to and from locations, escorting others, or being escorted yourself, including by taxi or bus, for example.

Working away from home

Working away from home includes working in locations outside of the home, such as undertaking delivery or taxi activities.

Working from home

Working from home includes working either from home or cafés and selling things online or showing people around your home to sell it.

Total paid work

Total paid work is a combination of working away from home and working from home.

Study

Study includes taking formal courses with university, college or school, for example, or taking courses for fun. This also includes time doing homework or home study.

Keep fit

Running, jogging, team sports, fitness classes, walking for exercise, dancing, swimming or other intensive solo exercises are all included as activities for keeping fit.

Unpaid childcare

Unpaid childcare includes unpaid feeding, washing, dressing or preparing meals for children; reading to children, playing with children or helping children with homework (or homeschooling); and supporting, comforting or cuddling children.

Other unpaid work (excluding travel and childcare)

Other activities you could contract out under normal circumstances but you do for yourself or others for free are all included as other unpaid work. This includes things like cleaning the house, ironing, adult care, making meals, or volunteering either for or through an organisation.

For this analysis, some of the activities that would normally be classed as unpaid work are shown separately, but we will be analysing unpaid work more completely in future releases.

Personal care (including eating and drinking)

Personal care includes eating and time spent getting washed, dressed, using the bathroom or getting ready to go out.

Entertainment, socialising or other free time

Time left over once all the other activities are counted is what we mean by entertainment, socialising or other free time. Other free time may include watching TV, playing games, listening to music, engaging in social or cultural events or meetings, work breaks, or spending time talking to others.

Other

Other includes time spent completing their time-use diary or where data are missing or illegible.

Household income

This includes the net monthly income of all household members from all sources, after tax and deductions.
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How we measure time in this release

Time is taken from the two most recent time-use studies in the UK: the 2014 to 2015 UK time-use study covering the UK and the 2020 Office for National Statistics (ONS) online time-use study covering Great Britain. The 2020 study was carried out exclusively for adults aged 18 years and over under coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions (between 28 March and 26 April) and can be used to understand the likely impact of the coronavirus pandemic and associated restrictions on what people in Great Britain are doing with their time.

The 2014 to 2015 study shows what people did with their time before the coronavirus pandemic; however, it is important to recognise that changes between the two studies could be unrelated to the coronavirus pandemic and instead reflect longer term changes in society.

The measures of time in this bulletin are made up of activities that have been recorded by respondents in a time-diary study. Respondents can record doing more than one activity at a time, but for comparability activities that respondents regarded as their main activity were used here.

Throughout the bulletin, time is reported in average minutes per day and week. These averages are useful as they give a good indication of a group's time taken up by a type of activity, but it should be recognised that this average will include people that do not engage in certain types of activities on a given day. Therefore, it should not be confused with the average amount of time taken to do an activity, as there are differences between the two definitions.

Types of activities in this report

To report on changes in how people use their time in this report, a range of time categories have been defined. For more information on these, with the exception of gardening and DIY and sleep or rest, please see Section 6: Glossary.

Feedback and future publications

Your feedback will be very valuable in making our results useful and accessible. If you have any questions, please email economic.wellbeing@ons.gov.uk.
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8. Strengths and limitations

Please note that any changes mentioned in this publication are statistically significant to the p is less than 0.05 level and that they have been based on unrounded data.
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Coronavirus and how people spent their time under lockdown - Office for National Statistics

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During lockdown, those with the lowest household incomes increased their total time in paid work, working a similar amount of time outside of the home as they did in 2014 to 2015; this may indicate that that those in lower income households are in occupations that cannot be undertaken from home.

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CNBC article- why physical books still outsell e-books 

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CNBC article- why physical books still outsell e-books 

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“traditional stores took a hit when amazon started selling printed books online back in 1994. In 2011, US chain Borders declared bankruptcy while Barnes & Noble sales have declined steadily for the past 6 years.” Then someone bought b&n, they also own waterstones.

“Bookshop customers are coming into bookshops for a very particular reason. There spaces are very welcoming, and people are looking all the time for things to do that are not on screen”. Think about escapism and how people want to now distract from the digital world.

“The book, in whatever format, has a strong future”

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Why physical books still outsell e-books | CNBC Reports

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'Why books are here to stay' by TED. Including Chip Kidd

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'Why books are here to stay' by TED. Including Chip Kidd

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His opinion on the ‘core purpose of a physical book’ is to record our existence and leave it behind on a shelf in a library, in a home for generations down the road to understand where they came from, that people went through some of the same things that they went through.”

“You have a much more human relationship to a printed book than you do to one that’s on a screen. People want the experience of holding it of turning the page of marking their progress in a story. And then you have of all things the smell of a book”

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Why books are here to stay | Small Thing Big Idea, a TED series

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Craig Mod blog post 2019 - stab a book, the book won't die

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Craig Mod blog post 2019 - stab a book, the book won't die

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a blog post where Craig Mod compares the book to other forms of media fighting for our attention in the modern day.
"A printed book is an object over which no third party has agency once in your possession. It’s protected (in the US, at least) by first sale doctrine. Digital books, not to the same degree. Amazon, for example, famously deleted editions of “1984” from everyone’s Kindles"
The second point Mod mentions is that free online resources are making money from the consumer by using their data. new forms of media including tv, radio, apps are attention grabbers which compete with the book market.
"Sitting outside all of this digital contractual complexity is the simple, boring, blissfully inert physical book. Given its plainness, it may be the most magical of all our contemporary technologies. It exists simply to be still, cannot be optimized, will never know us, and though a body is still while reading, the mind is active, telepathy is happening, and a sense of self-betterment and hope pervades as we turn the final page."

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How do we account for the resilient nature of books? They're not dead, though according to a hundred years of prognostications of their demise, they should be.

To understand why books are still around, and why they delight as they do, we need to do some "media accounting" - What are the costs (individually, socially) of engaging with certain media and mediums, apps and publications?

Understanding the contracts into which we enter with media helps demystify why physical books (and, similarly, vinyl, analog film, et cetera) not only remain compelling, but become more compelling the more their digital twins grow vast and fuzzy.

This essay is just a cursory document. A light expansion on a lecture I gave at Yale for the 2019 Yale Publishing Course.

Let's begin with printed books.

Printed books have clear contracts. I've written about this in passing before, over in :

We buy a book, we know what we're getting. There is no other "business model" at play. No other information being (necessarily, relatively) sold. This clarity of contract is especially lucid in physical form. The book has edges. The transaction has edges. The transaction completes. Given time, we complete the book. It has an ending. Contracts are clear. Usually, there's no tracking.

A printed book is an object over which no third party has agency once in your possession. It's protected (in the US, at least) by first sale doctrine. Digital books, not to the same degree. Amazon, for example, famously deleted editions of "1984" from everyone's Kindles. Simultaneously, today (2019), courts in France are challenging the general inability to resell digital goods.

The immutability of printed books is their superpower. Remember this, because it's from this immutability that books derive their dead-simple "contract."

#Attention Monsters: Things that Eat Attention

The main adversary of books and book publishing is: Anything that eats attention.

Publishing has always been a game of competing for attention. Any number of media inventions have threatened to eviscerate the book market: radio, movies, television, et cetera. But smartphones tip the scales unlike any previous object. They do so by placing into our pockets a perfect, always-at-hand vector for "lopsided user contracts," arriving in the form of apps and websites.

These suboptimal contracts are at their most exaggeratedly worst in what I call "attention monsters." That is, any app / service / publication whose business is predicated on keeping a consumer engaged and re-engaged for the benefit of the organization (often to the detriment of the mental and physical health of the user), dozens if not hundreds or thousands of times a day.

A simple heuristic for determining if something is an attention monster: "Free" apps built around advertising models tend to become attention monsters. Especially if they've taken on a lot of venture capital, a tendency even further exacerbated if they're a public company.

Instagram is a great example. The more you scroll, the more money they make. Consider the "agreement" into which you've entered with the application the next time you find yourself mindlessly scrolling. What's keeping you there? Why are the algorithms showing you what they're showing? What benefits are you accruing? Why do you feel the need to post what you're posting? For what are are you trading your time and mental energy?

Most likely, you're stuck in a "tiny loop:"

- a senseless series of actions that span minutes, hours, days, consume years, and add up to nothing or almost nothing, and that benefit (ideally: tranquility, growth, curiosity) no one but the company (in reality: engagement, ad views) who owns the container in which the loop takes place.

Because of a need to show consistent growth over time, attention monster methods of consuming user attention become more aggressive the larger the user base becomes. A once simple contract ("connect with your friends online," "post photos with cool filters," et cetera) into which we may have entered with a free app begins to change by small degrees when that app or publication is pushed to increase profitability.

As a grossly-simplified counter example: Consider almost any piece of open source software. The version control software 'Git' is used by hundreds of millions of people, as are Apache and nginx web servers, but none of these examples contains user experience dark patterns, nor are they concerned with consuming attention.

Apps that feed off of and grow based on attention are often dopaminergic. They are built to amplify reward seeking behavior, releasing unpredictable hits of dopamine: Another like. A DM. A new QAnon video in a sidebar. A "related article" about vaccination dangers. Something - anything - to increase engagement time in service to ad revenue.

#Publications (are different from books)

Publications also fall into this bucket.

The New York Times is a partially dopaminergic publication. That is, the success of it as a business is still contingent on readers looking at a lot of ads. It's also dependent on subscriptions, which is why the writing is usually high-caliber; quality is necessary to convert casual readers into subscribers (hyperbole is necessary to multiply ad views); becoming a subscriber is often a proxy vote for quality.

But the Times makes a significant portion of its profits from ads, so eating your attention is still good for the organism. Hence, click-bait headlines. And horrible, horrible election needles: real-time "content machinery" adjacent to ads from which you can't avert your gaze. Of course, The Times is not the only publication that functions like this. Most legacy or incumbent news organizations do, too.

When these incumbent newspapers were print only, there was only one way to "enter" the content: Through the front page. The front page was all you could see on the news stand. Once you bought the thing, you were converted to a paying participant.

Make note: Design and contract parameters go hand in hand. When the front page is the only entry point, only a single page of the publication requires hyperbole to convert passers-by to readers. Online, every article becomes a potential entry point. And so there is an incentive for pervasive hyperbole in order to "convert" eyeballs in service to ads and the consumption of more attention.

In contrast, publications like The Information or Stratechery or The New Consumer - recently founded publications - are (almost?) entirely subscriber based, and thereby shed themselves of attention gorging.

The contract a reader enters with The Information is very clear: We pay, they write. Enough of us pay so they can keep writing. They write in a way that provides value via knowledge (ostensibly leading to smarter business decisions or investments on the part of the reader; i.e., extremely clear value proposition), not shock. Their model is not contingent on us looking at their writing from morning until night. Once a day is more than enough. Entry points are limited. It's a healthy model for all parties.

As The Information says on their about page:

Quality stories breed quality subscribers. As our subscriber community grows, we're investing aggressively in our team and reporting. We believe this formula is far more scalable than relying on traffic or conferences, and it's totally-100 percent-aligned with our readers.

Our contract with The New York Times is more slippery. Yes, we pay and they write, but also, they take our viewing patterns, biases, reading habits, estimated income and sell that to advertisers. That's a weirder contract. And one into which most people don't realize they've entered.

All of this attention eating is relatively new. It is, as I said above, largely reliant on the smartphones in our pockets. The rise of attention monsters and this scale of attention consumption and lopsided contracts is one of many unintended consequences of the last ten years of internet growth and pocket supercomputers.

Consider the contracts of these two images.

People on a train today:

People on a train in Philadelphia 65 years ago:

Superficially these images look similar: folks committed to a horizontal surface held in front of their faces. But the contract of these two objects couldn't be more different.

The printed newspaper of 1919 had edges, ended. There were ads but they were passive, not active members of the reading experience. They were not reading you. You paid. You got some paper. The paper did not continue forever.

Most readers may be too young to remember this, but once upon a time, even television ended. There was an implicit contract in that eventually you'd be allowed - nay, forced - to sleep. Like, you'd be watching some late-night show and the broadcast would just ... finish. Kaput. The national anthem would blare and then the broadcast completion tone would wake any fools still perched in their living room Lay-Z-Boys.

#Netflix vs. Criterion

Compare that era of television with opening the Netflix app. CEO Reed Hastings: "Sleep is our competitor."

Netflix is a company with a 134 billion dollar market capitalization and 6,000+ employees. Competition is rapidly rising: Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go / Now / MAX, Apple TV+. Netflix is a public company. They must continue to grow. Netflix can't lose us as subscribers, but they also can't charge much more. In fact, it's likely they'll have to reduce prices. And so, one imagines an internal doctrine: Netflix must become a downtime habit humans cannot live without. The service must become a teat, an irreplaceable and inexhaustible binge conveyance. Unsubscribe? Unthinkable! Their current strategy in achieving this is to produce an endless profusion of well-funded shows. Some of which are superb. They produced 700 - 7-0-0 - shows in 2018 alone.

Compare now with Criterion Collection. Both services are nearly technically identical: Monthly subscriptions that allow a customer to watch, from a vast catalog, a moving image on any of their devices at any moment. But, again, the numbers. Criterion is a: $33,000,000 / year business with 40 employees. Scale matters. No, Criterion won't be producing $100,000,000 TV shows, but as a service, a company at their chosen scale, they can operate under a sustainable ethos of: Deliver one amazing piece of classic, independent, or foreign film a week.

The contracts users enter into when using Criterion or Netflix manifest most clearly in design. Browsing Netflix is an endless sensation of falling forward into ever more content. Previews auto-play. As soon as one episode in a series ends, the next begins before credits finish rolling. If there's no other episodes in the series, random trailers begin to play.

The very design of Netflix itself is constructed to reduce your ability to:

1. think about what you want to do, or

2. step away from the service

It's designed to be a boundless slurry of content poured directly into your eyeballs. In a way, it's training us to never step back or even consider, say, reading a book or going for a walk. The binge is dopaminergic to the max, satisfying the completionist instinct.

In breathless doublespeak, Hastings has said, "Binge-watching is great because it puts you in control."

Take a moment to consider: The scale at which this system is operating, the original contract you felt you had entered into, and your relationship to and sense of contract with the service today.

Now go browse Criterion.

There's clearly value in both models. Netflix, in producing its infinitude of content will invariably create some classics, give voice to folks who've yet to be voiced. And Criterion, in time, will help us wade through the muck for gems.

The publishing industry has similar analogs: Big publishers produce lightweight bestsellers, the profits from which find their way into more complex and challenging, less commercial books. However, the big difference is books (mostly) don't autoload themselves into your head; they require a constant opting-in on the part of the reader.

Worth noting: I don't think a company like Netflix has to operate at its current extremes and could be more balanced; my example above may be somewhat binary, but companies can and do choose to occupy greyer zones.

The takeaway: The contract - emotionally, physically (bingeing is as much a physical decision as it is mental) - with Criterion is far simpler, clearer, and I'd argue, healthier in the long term than the contract we currently enter into with Netflix.

#Publishers, huh, what are they good for

At Yale I was speaking to a bunch of publishers. So I proposed the following:

Our goal as publishers should be: To make it easier for readers to choose the habit of (longform) reading.

And then:

The adversary of books is anything that eats attention - attention monsters.

The way to fight attention monsters is by helping potential readers habituate the very act of reading.

Habits and identities are intertwined. Increased self-awareness around media contracts makes it easier to convert the identities of wanna-be readers into full-fledged bag-o-books readers. Our goal is not to get someone to read a single book, but become a reader.

That said: I have no idea how to reliably do that!

I can only share how I've converted myself into a more fervent reader:

I always have a Kindle Paperwhite in my bag. I dislike much about this device. It is a device of sadness, of unrealized potential. But, it is also a device (in my case) with a bunch of good, long form articles and books on it. The battery lasts for weeks. It is always in my bag because I never want an excuse to not engage with a long form piece of text. I want it to be as easy to reach for a book as it is to reach for my phone. I choose the Paperwhite because it's small and light.

In service to helping me read more books, I've also turned off all non-tool apps on my phone. All I can do on my iPhone is check Google Maps, text, and read email. I use Freedom to block all media, social and otherwise. Using this combination I've read more books this year than I have in the past three combined.

#Contracts and Habits

James Clear's book Atomic Habits has had a profound effect on the way I understand many of the patterns I've constructed in my life over these last five years. I had intuited what was and wasn't working, but Clear's book gave me a framework for understanding why. You should read the entire thing.

Here are two big takeaways that are relevant to our contracts, attention monsters, and books discussion:

1. True behavior change is identity change.

2. "Motion" is the act of researching; "action" is getting your reps in. Never mistake the two.

James makes the argument that identity change (via an ever increasing belief in both your goal identity itself and the processes by which that identity is formed) happens as a cascade of incremental 1% changes in positive or negative directions. Opportunities for this percent change present themselves dozens of times a day. The best way to guarantee success is by preemptively engineering systems to reduce friction for positive habits, and increase friction for negative ones. Carrying a Kindle and blocking most media on my phone are two core pieces to my system of maintaining, believing in, and strengthening my identity as a "reader" and maintaining what I consider "healthy" contracts with apps and media.

If habits define identity, then given the amount of time so many of us devote to reloading Twitter, opening Netflix, checking reddit, et cetera, are most of our identities that of media addict?

I suspect most folks reading this would not want to self-identify as an Instagram hope-to-be-influencer or Twitter combatant or Netflix binger. But most wouldn't shy from self-identifying as, say, a reader.

We're amicable to calling ourselves readers for the same reason we want to identify as rock climbers or marathon runners or exceptional parents or selfless children or humanitarians or folks who've written thoughtful and considered books - because these activities carry with them an implicit sense of self-betterment, typified by being active (as opposed to passive).

To climb El Capitan requires dedication, discipline, focus - and yes, some insanity. To be a good child means taking care of a parent, calling, remembering, participating. The implied (and attractive) corollary of cultivating those qualities is that you're a more perceptive, present human, experiencing and living life with a certain (healthy / obsessive) fullness.

#Reading and Attention

Sustained reading of long form texts and books is perhaps the most "active" of all basic media consumption. Philip Roth, in 2009, prognosticating the death of the novel, smartly points out:

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by - it's hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities.

I love this: "If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really." Meaning: To truly read (and, I might add, write) is to commit and maintain focus long enough to live fully within the world of the book (as opposed to ten second dips in and out, as we mostly do with much online media).

William Styron put it well:

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end.

The critical insight is that deep reading is an active exhaustion, the result of burned calories, not the passive exhaustion of an underused body and mind.

Patterns among those of us who love reading and identify as "readers" show a continued predilection towards physical books. At Yale, Nihar Malaviya, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Penguin Random House U.S., put up a slide titled: "Formats have been shifting over the years - but have been somewhat stable recently."

Of note:

39% of Americans read only print books

29% read a mixture of digital and print

7% read digital-only

(24% simply don't read)

There are likely a number of factors for this. An obvious one: Publishers deliberately set the price of digital books sometimes higher than physical books, especially with new releases. Or they set the price barely lower than the cost of a physical book. Because we perceive physical as having more implicit value (resaleability, for example) a rational consumer picks the physical edition over Kindle edition given the same price, doubly so given same or next day delivery (where the immediacy benefit of digital is nullified).

But I suspect there is also an unconscious bias growing towards simpler contracts. And a physical book provides the simplest contract of most media today. Simpler contracts often (but not always) mean that the object or app or piece of media has our best interests in mind (that's why the contract is simple; the befuddling nature of complex contracts is a feature for the company defining the contract, not a bug), simpler contracts make it easier for us to do "action" as opposed to "motion."

James Clear's definition of "motion" would include: Searching for books to read, queuing them up in the Kindle, getting samples, reading reviews. (Similarly: Fighting bots on Twitter, mindlessly bouncing around on YouTube via the algorithms.) These actions can trick us into thinking we're doing work when we aren't. Therefore it's not identity building; it's charlatanism to call yourself a reader if all you do is collect Kindle samples but never finish a book.

"Action" is doing the actual reading. And a paper book - because it is free from outside intrusions, especially compared to reading Kindle books on an iPad or iPhone - helps us succeed at this action component of identity building.

The hardware Kindle is not ideal, and Amazon itself (as almost any company operating at that scale) is ethically fraught, but in my case, I find significantly more value (i.e., the ability to perform "action") in having a number of book options always with me (via a hardware Kindle) than carrying multiple physical books. If I only read physical books I wouldn't read as much. When I finish a Kindle book I love, I almost always buy a physical copy to doubly support the author / publisher, and for archival + field-of-vision reference purposes.

#The Ethics of Books

One of the biggest adversaries of book publishing is attention monsters. And the collective goal of publishers should be to do everything they can to foster the habit of reading. Articulating and amplifying the benefits of reading would help convert non-readers into readers and help make the choice to engage in active media (vs passive media) 1% easier.

Because: There's a broad ethical argument to be made for converting more of society into "active media" participants. ( Done most effectively by showing children through parental example. As I've written many times before: Much of what we sense as being possible or impossible is based on nearby archetypes.)

In this essay I've been talking about books as the quintessence of "active" media, but I believe video (along with all other forms of media) can be made more active with healthier contracts; not all video has to devolve into lowest common denominator binge passivity.

The Mr. Rogers documentary, "Won't you be my Neighbor?" is exemplary in casting light on how Fred Rogers saw the television as a vector for pedagogical amplification: teaching children goodness, kindness, emotional intelligence at scale. Access to high-quality educational programming has been shown to raise IQs. Access to lower-quality programming has been shown to lower voter turnout.

Choose active media, set yourself up to succeed by building systems to cultivate positive habits, but most importantly: Take a second to think about the contracts you've entered into as you go about your day. Are those contracts you're happy with? Did you realize you had entered into them?

Jia Tolentino's opening piece in her most excellent Trick Mirror takes us through how the web changed over the past twenty years:

"At ten I was clicking around a web ring to check out other Angelfire sites. At twelve I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. At fifteen I was uploading photos of myself in a miniskirt on Myspace. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. Now I'm thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection - this feverish, electric, unlivable hell."

In reading between the lines of her essay: The contract changed, shifted slowly beneath us, until our work and lives became defined by something we don't wholly understand, and never really opted into. The good news is that it's all relatively early in this game. Dire as it may seem, none of these contracts are fait accompli. I believe we all have more autonomy than we may think.

Sitting outside all of this digital contractual complexity is the simple, boring, blissfully inert physical book. Given its plainness, it may be the most magical of all our contemporary technologies. It exists simply to be still, cannot be optimized, will never know us, and though a body is still while reading, the mind is active, telepathy is happening, and a sense of self-betterment and hope pervades as we turn the final page.

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How do we account for the resilient nature of books? They're not dead, though according to a hundred years of prognostications of their demise, they should be. To understand why books are still around, and why they delight as they do, we need to do some "media accounting" - What are the costs (individually, socially) of engaging with certain media and mediums, apps and publications?

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AIGA/NY PRESENTS: THE NEXT CHAPTER: THE DESIGN AND PUBLISHING OF THE DIGITAL BOOK 2009

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AIGA/NY PRESENTS: THE NEXT CHAPTER: THE DESIGN AND PUBLISHING OF THE DIGITAL BOOK 2009

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presented by chip kidd
carin Goldberg- "we all must concede to the fact that printing most books is impractical and unsustainable both viscallly and environmentally."
this tan also featured Craig Mod and Jeremy Clark

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“the emergence of ebooks posed a threat to physical books a decade or so ago. But publishers fought back, making books that were more beautiful to look at and to hold than ever before. Fonts got bolder, colours brighter, paper more tactile. There was embossing, foil, cloth bindings and elaborate end papers. Bookshops also became spaces to spend time in, not just to shop, with books presented as objects of desire on curated table and window displays.”

Also, bookstagram on social media. Cover design is now more important than ever.

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A pair of eyes and red lips floating in a midnight sky above the bright lights of New York on The Great Gatsby. The half-man, half-devil on Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho. A single cog for an eye on A Clockwork Orange. Two orange silhouettes on David Nicholls' One Day. The original Harry Potter colour illustrations.

More like this:
- How bookshops are helping with isolation
- The prophetic writer who gives us hope
- How to tell other people's stories

A great book might stay with us for a long time but, often, its cover does too. There's a famous saying about never forming your opinion of a book by the jacket adorning it. But most readers know that we do, in fact, judge books by their covers all the time. Everything about a book's cover - the font, the images, the colours - tells us something about what we can expect to find, or not, inside. A reader in the market for some bleak dystopian fiction is unlikely to have their head turned by a pastel-hued jacket with serif font.

Covers can be a swift way to signal genre, but the good ones do more than that. They give face to a book's personality. They're what will make you pick it up in the first place, then keep it on your shelf to remind you what it meant to you. "When you're reading a book, it stays with you for a while, literally," says Donna Payne, creative director at Faber & Faber. "The physical book is in your bag, in your hand, by your bedside table."

The emergence of ebooks posed a threat to physical books a decade or so ago. But publishers fought back, making books that were more beautiful to look at and to hold than ever before. Fonts got bolder, colours brighter, paper more tactile. There was embossing, foil, cloth bindings and elaborate end papers. Bookshops also became spaces to spend time in, not just to shop, with books presented as objects of desire on curated table and window displays.

Alongside this - perhaps even because of it - people increasingly started posting pictures of books on social media. Search #bookstagram on Instagram and you'll find more than 43 million images of books - next to cups of coffee, lying on crisp duvet covers, perched on the edge of sun loungers and in artfully haphazard stacks. And a medium that is all about visuals the more photogenic a book is, the more likely you are to see it all over your feed. In response to the coronavirus crisis and lockdown, the New York Public Library has even asked people to recreate their favourite book covers.
Cover art
All this means cover design is more important than ever. "I think people are really appreciating it as a form again, and designers have massively upped their game," says Payne. But what makes a great cover? "For us, it's one that elicits a response of some sort. It might be that not everyone loves the cover. Or it might be that everyone is talking about it. But what we don't ever want to do is produce covers that are bland."

A successful cover conveys something about the words inside. "If you've got a visceral piece of writing that's risk-taking and bold, it's important to put that cover on that book," she says, citing Eimear McBride's A Girl is A Half Formed Thing - which she designed - as an example. "The symbol of the fruit and the wet and kind of rotting paper, along with the font, just felt like it fit so seamlessly into the reading experience."

Payne says creating a cover that is true to the book is just as important as creating something memorable. "You can publish an incredibly beautiful cover that leads you to believe it's a certain type of book, and if that reading experience is quite different from that, it feels kind of disappointing. You've failed in finding the right readers for that book."

Jon Gray, who over a 20-year career has designed covers for authors including Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Salmon Rushdie and David Foster Wallace, says there's more pressure than ever to get covers right. "Bookshops are such a riot," he says. "It's like a big crowded party and you're trying to get your face to stand out in the crowd. To make an impact and get someone to pick up a book and turn it over is getting harder and harder."

It's not just in shops that books need to stand out, but online too - whether that's on social media or the sites people buy from - and that's had an impact on how they look, says Gray. "Online marketing and media has led to a trend for brighter, super-saturated covers in print. The use of fluorescent and special colours and saturated imagery with white-out text. Print is being asked to match the brightness of screen."

One of Gray's early and most successful designs was for 2002's Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. "That set me on the path of doing what I do in terms of trying to get books to look like individual objects. It was the first time I really thought I want it to represent what's inside rather than it just be some kind of statement." The influence of Gray's hand-drawn font is still seen on covers today - though he tries never to repeat himself. "I'm trying to make each book stand out on its own, so it doesn't look anything else. I hope I don't have too much of a style. I'd be really happy if people couldn't tell I'd done a book."

He gets manuscripts early on and reads the whole thing before coming up with ideas, to make sure he doesn't misrepresent the text in any way. Sometimes authors have a clear idea of what they want - like Zadie Smith. "She is very visual, she's got a very strong idea of what she likes," says Gray. "She'll say: 'I've been looking at this', or 'Can we try something like this?', give you a mood and a flavour, then give you free reign. It's a joy to work like that."

It's not just new books where the cover is fretted over. Increasingly, publishers are rereleasing classic books with redesigned or special edition jackets. Iconic album covers might be set in stone - but books often get several stabs at a cover. To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Vintage will republish some of its 10 bestselling books - including To Kill A Mockingbird and The Handmaid's Tale - with new covers.

Faber have partnered with department store Liberty to publish some of their classic titles in special cloth-bound covers. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies were recently rejacketed to coincide with the release of the third book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and The Light. And Penguin Classics is set to release a science-fiction series in August - new covers featuring line drawings from artists and designers including Picasso, Le Corbusier and Herbert Bayer have been created for each of the 10 launch titles. According to Penguin art director Jim Stoddart: "Drawings have a lucid faculty to convey the innate human motive at the root of all these stories, whether experimental, humorous or chilling." The publisher chose cover artists who, like the authors, "have developed alternative and often visionary ways of presenting reality".

Payne claims that designing a new cover for a classic novel is also a chance to bring out an aspect of the book that hasn't been explored before. "You have so many books published every day, it's important to get those classic titles back on the table in front of store, and a new jacket will help to do that," she says.

Over the past year, Gray has designed new editions of JD Salinger's novels and a new edition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, inspired by the concentric circles of Shirley Tucker's original design. "There's pressure to do it justice for yourself, I think. For me to do The Bell Jar, I thought I'm only going to get one go, so I want to do it right."

Working with a well-known book brings its own set of challenges - and not just finding a new take when dozens before you have already stamped their mark. "You're working on something that has already established itself, and people have got strong feelings about it, and you're also working with the estates, who want to protect the legacy." Salinger had a clause in his contract that only his name and the title can appear on the cover - no images, no quotes, no blurb.

When a book is already much loved, any new design runs the risk of ruffling some feathers. In 2013, Faber published a 50th-anniversary edition of The Bell Jar that featured an illustration of a woman fixing her make-up in a compact mirror. It drew a mixed response, with some accusing them of trying to repackage it as 'chick lit', and the publisher releasing a statement defending the design, saying: "We love it, and the sales since publication suggest that new readers are finding it in the way that we hoped."

Some books can overcome an unpopular cover. Much has been written on why Elena Ferrante's best-selling and critically acclaimed Neapolitan novels, which chronicle the 60-year friendship between two women from Naples, have covers akin to a Hallmark card. Authors themselves aren't always fans of their own covers. In 2015, a newly unearthed letter to her agent showed Agatha Christie hated a design for her book, Sad Cypress, calling it "common" and "awful" and asking for it to be pulped and redone.

Such staunch views just show how important book jackets are, says Payne. "It's always lovely to hear passion. It's always lovely to get feedback, even if the feedback isn't all positive. If every book jacket you designed was successful every time it would mean that you never took any risks. Ultimately, disappointing jackets are those that are somehow safe."

Gray has a few authors left on his design wishlist - including Iris Murdoch, John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver - but says he isn't too precious when his own work gets rejacketed. Even so, it's nice to see it out in the world - whether on an Instagram post or being read on public transport.

"I still get a kick out of seeing people reading books I've designed on the tube, or spotting it in a shop window," he says. "Though the flipside of that is I can walk into any charity shop and see my entire back catalogue."
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A pair of eyes and red lips floating in a midnight sky above the bright lights of New York on The Great Gatsby. The half-man, half-devil on Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho. A single cog for an eye on A Clockwork Orange. Two orange silhouettes on David Nicholls' One Day.

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“Books will become cheaper and more easily accessible.” – audiobooks better for the visually impaired.

“Hypertext, embedded video, and other undreamt-of technologies will give rise to new poetic, rhetorical, and narrative possibilities.” Exciting possibilities to combine technology with books

“As paper books become more unusual, some will continue to buy them as collectors’ items, others for the superior sensory experience they afford.”

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The change has come more slowly to books than it came to music or to business correspondence, but by now it feels inevitable. The digital era is upon us. The s and s of 2025 will be consumed primarily as e-books. In many ways, this is good news. Books will become cheaper and more easily accessible. Hypertext, embedded video, and other undreamt-of technologies will give rise to new poetic, rhetorical, and narrative possibilities. But a literary culture that has defined itself through paper books for centuries will surely feel the loss as they pass away.

In the past several years, we've all heard readers mourn the passing of the printed word. The elegy is familiar: I crave the smell of a well-worn book, the weight of it in my hands; all of my favorite books I discovered through loans from a friend, that minor but still-significant ritual of trust; I need to see it on my shelf after I've read it (and I don't mind if others see it too); and what is a classic if not a book where I'm forced to rediscover my own embarrassing college-age marginalia?

Luddites can take comfort in the persistence of vinyl records, postcards, and photographic film. The paper book will likewise survive, but its place in the culture will change significantly. As it loses its traditional value as an efficient vessel for text, the paper book's other qualities-from its role in literary history to its inimitable design possibilities to its potential for physical beauty-will take on more importance. The future is yet to be written, but a few possibilities for the fate of the paper book are already on display on bookshelves near you.

* * *

We're warned from an early age not to be taken in by the sensuous aspects of a paper book's design, such as its cover. Yet the visual effect of a well-made book, even an inexpensive paperback, unquestionably shapes our interpretation and appreciation of the text.

Consider this Penguin UK collection of essays by the German critic Walter Benjamin. The front cover comments on the book's status as a manufactured object. This is in harmony with Benjamin's text: "[T]hat which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence."

Now, as we move into the digital age, the well-made copy has come to occupy a familiar, almost nostalgic middle ground between the aura of an original and the ghostly quality of a computer file. A mass-produced paper book, though bulkier and more expensive, may continue to be more desirable because it carries with it this material presence. And presence means something-or it can, at least, in the hands of a good book designer.

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The mechanical reproduction of literary texts is a very old story-more than 500 years old. Printed books were an early experiment in the mass production of art. Out of that successful venture, among other literary advances, the novel was born. Writers like Cervantes recognized and realized the potential of the printed book, that ingenious device for delivering stories and ideas to an idle provincial reader.

The story of features countless printed books, and the entire novel can be read as a commentary on and intellectual advancement of that revolutionary technology. Is it any more appropriate to consume on an e-reader than it is to, say, watch a colorized, 3-D ?

This question points to a second possible mode of survival for the paper book in the digital age. Purists will argue that some important texts ought to be read in their original form. This may be especially convincing when it comes to the novel, a literary form so bound up in the history of the printed book-and, by many accounts, well past its golden age as the digital transition begins.

Of course, advances in book technology often add to texts as much as they take away. For example, innovations in wood engraving led to Gustav Doré's famous 1863 illustrations of .

When we speak of illustrations, book covers, typesetting, and other features specific to a given print edition, we're analyzing what the French theorist Gérard Genette calls "paratexts." In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, he writes, "[A]lthough we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround and extend it, precisely in order to it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text's presence in the world, its 'reception' and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book."

As e-books overhaul and re-present many long-standing paratextual categories, we trade off layers of established meaning. The typescript page shown here, from James Joyce's , is a famous example of a paratext with clear authorial intent. Joyce asked the printer to enlarge the final, redundant period at the end of the "Ithaca" chapter. On a Kindle, the reader can adjust the font size herself.

Joyce wanted his free-floating period to be especially visible because it meant more than the average punctuation mark-it gave a full stop to the long "sentence" that was . Recently, several young writers have further cultivated paratextual elements like punctuation, typesetting, and binding as arenas of authorial expression. Dave Eggers prints body text on the cover of his book; Mark Z. Danielewski uses colored, upside-down, and Braille fonts; Salvador Plascencia crosses out words and blacks over whole columns of text. Laurence Sterne's 1759 novel with its blank, black, and marbled pages, stands as an early precedent for these sorts of explorations.

,Jonathan Safran Foer's 2010 novel-by-erasure, is one example of a paratextually audacious paper book that would lose much in translation to an e-book. Foer picked through the pages of his favorite novel (Bruno Schulz's ), pulling out words to create a new narrative composed entirely from Schulz's raw material. Foer's originality can be questioned (Tom Phillips' tried the same trick 40 years ago), and his finished product arguably fails to bridge the divide between conceptual art and literature, but the design work is unimpeachable. Substantial portions of each page are die cut, creating evocative, three-dimensional wells of negative space. Schulz was killed in the Holocaust at the age of 50 with several good works likely left in him. Foer's tribute gives paratextual emphasis to this loss.

Unlike Cervantes, Joyce, and Schulz, living writers can raise objections when their work is adulterated to fit new forms of literary consumption. For example, Salvador Plascencia, author of the 2005 McSweeney's novel The People of Paper, has been vocal in asking that readers enjoy his book in printed form and not on Kindle, Nook, iPad, or other e-readers. He points to the title of his novel by way of an explanation. "Readers would be missing an essential material metaphor if they were on a pixel reader," he says.

"That, and I don't want hapless readers enlarging my fonts and thinking that the book lives in this androgynous space that is neither recto nor verso," Plascencia adds. "The book is sexed: on your left you have a verso, in the middle your gutter, and to the right your recto. E-readers are neutering and spaying our sexy novels." In The People of Paper, for example, different storylines play out in verso and recto, respectively, with odd-numbered pages following one set of characters and even-numbered pages another.

This is one future for the paper book in the age of digital proliferation-a select group of design-conscious authors will continue to address their creations specifically to the printed medium. Their themes, like Plascencia's and Foer's, will likely revolve around the history and practice of writing books, but that's nothing out of the ordinary-one of literature's greatest themes has always been itself.

Other writers go even further, making over the entire paratextual edifice, as Anne Carson does for her recent New Directions publication, . "When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book," she writes on the back cover. "This is a replica of it, as close as we could get." The book is indeed a facsimile of a handmade original, bound accordion-style and boxed. Verso pages "translate" a Catullus elegy by offering long Latin-English dictionary entries for each word in the poem. Recto pages tell the story of Carson's relationship to her brother through fragments of lyric essay and primary materials like photographs and letters.

Carson, a classicist, is well aware of the ways texts evolve or disappear when confronted with changes in modes of transmission. For instance, her (1999) purports to complete a once-famous ancient Greek epic of which only a few fragments now survive. She must have been thinking in that long view, embracing the uncertain future of the book, as she assembled this tribute to her brother in a mortal coil of paper-fragile, tactually sensuous, and fully incarnate in its physical form.

Carson's approach fits into the burgeoning category of "artist's book"-meaning roughly that the design and paratextual elements of the book are at least as artistically significant as the text.

William Blake is often regarded as the father of the genre. To separate his text from its setting is to lose an essential dimension of meaning and expression. So his images, the product of an archaic process of engraving and hand-coloring, have survived through centuries of changing print technologies. Though students often first encounter Blake's poems stripped of their illustrations in paper anthologies, facsimile editions of his major works remain available in bookstores to this day. The tendency to read Blake in facsimile will likely survive the digital transition as well-a testimony to Blake's unique and successful blending of literary and visual arts.

Along the same lines, a first-edition Blake boasts an aura equal to that of a great painting or sculpture. This opens another possibility for the paper book in the digital age: As paper books lose their use value and become collector's objects, writers gain access to the speculative art market. If Blake were alive today, he would find an art market primed and ready to pay vast sums for limited edition copies produced in his studio. This could become an enticing alternative for art- and prestige-oriented writers squeezed by a declining publishing industry.

Andrew Hoyem's San Francisco-based Arion Press can be thought of as a sort of laboratory for fine-art approaches to publishing literature. Arion's catalog features a 50-pound Monotype folio Bible; an elegant with commissioned wood engravings; a radical, two-dimensional that folds out to form a 30-foot plane of text; and a with John Shade's meta-fictional poem printed on index cards in a separate volume.

A common Arion approach is to pair a hand-setting of a text with new work by a contemporary artist. Pictured below are Kiki Smith's illustrations of " I Love My Love " by the early Beat poet Helen Adam. Only 101 copies were printed.

Many fine presses around the country put out similarly handcrafted products, often featuring new fiction or poetry. Absent the contributions of well-known artists like Smith, these publications are often labors of love, driven more by an ascendant creative-class interest in pre-digital technologies than any existing profit model. However, as mass-market paperbacks give way to e-books, fine press editions seem poised to appeal to the nostalgic consumer of paper books.

Who will buy these new, well-made paper books? One likely result of the transition to e-books is that paper book culture will move further out of reach for those without disposable income. Debt-ridden college students, underemployed autodidacts, and the everyday mass of bargain-hunters will find better deals on the digital side of the divide. (Netflix for books, anyone?)

As paper books become more unusual, some will continue to buy them as collectors' items, others for the superior sensory experience they afford. There's reason to think this is happening already: Carl Jung's , a facsimile edition featuring hand-painted text and illustrations, sold well in America in 2010 despite its $195 price tag. When readers believe that a book is special in itself, as an object, they can be persuaded to pay more.

Bookshelves will survive in the homes of serious digital-age readers, but their contents will be much more judiciously curated. The next generation of paper books will likely rival the art hanging beside them on the walls for beauty, expense, and "aura"-for better or for worse.

There's a whole class of paper books we haven't discussed yet-the paratextually unremarkable, unimaginatively designed rows of paperbacks and late-edition hardcovers that line most of our shelves. These are headed for the same place most manufactured objects go eventually-the scrapheap.

In its own way, even the well-made paper book may someday reach a similar fate. The art market may have deep pockets, but historically it hasn't been very hospitable to literature. As far as the "artist's book" is concerned, the first term in the phrase has tended to take precedence, in the past century at least. A lover of literature can't help feeling that-as the conventions of the paper book have come under the interrogation of the visual arts-poetry, rhetoric, narrative, and meaning have often suffered.

German artist Dieter Roth's Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Work in 20 Volumes (1974) is an ominous example. Roth ground up the philosopher's complete works and used them as a substitute for meat in a recipe for homemade sausage. The result is literaturwurst-a final possible future for the paper book in the age of digital proliferation.

Don't forget to read about the key and the other objects featured in our series on everyday design.

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Will Paper Books Exist in the Future? Yes, but They'll Look Different.

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The change has come more slowly to books than it came to music or to business correspondence, but by now it feels inevitable. The digital era is upon us. The s and s of 2025 will be consumed primarily as e-books. In many ways, this is good news.

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"So what is the solution? If there are design limitations with digital content, there are also new opportunities. Goldberg presented a showcase of animated book covers her students had produced. My first reaction: why don’t more publishers do animated book covers? Of course we have to ignore the fact that such animations are impossible on black-and-white e-readers."

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By Hannah Johnson

The reading experience on a Kindle is like "reading through a tub full of dirty dishwater," said book designer Carin Goldberg at an event entitled "The Next Chapter: The Design and Publishing of the Digital Book." E-books, and the endless uniformity of their reflowable text, are some of the most egregious offenders of bad aesthetics.

The event took place in late January at the New School for Design in Manhattan and was organized by AIGA, the professional association for design. Goldberg (designer and design instructor), along with Chip Kidd (Knopf), Jeremy Clark (Adobe) and Craig Mod (writer and publisher) spoke about the design challenges and opportunities that digital books present.

One thing that the speakers made clear is that the design of a book is very much informed by the format. Chip Kidd flipped through images of his wonderfully designed cover for 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, and lovingly explained how the design of the hardback reflected the two planes of existence in the book. But of the two-dimensional cover on the iPad, Kidd remarked sarcastically, "whoop-di-f*cking-doo." The audience roared with laughter. In truth, however, the iPad cover is what many readers are going to see - both when they browse in the iTunes store and when they open the book for the first time.

When designing for digital, Goldberg said, "the vocabulary is very different from print." Maybe the mindset needs to be different as well. Shoving print design into digital format can result in less-than-exciting outcomes, like Kidd's reaction to his own design on the iPad.

So what is the solution? If there are design limitations with digital content, there are also new opportunities. Goldberg presented a showcase of animated book covers her students had produced. My first reaction: why don't more publishers do animated book covers? Of course we have to ignore the fact that such animations are impossible on black-and-white e-readers.

Nobody really had a solution for ugly e-reader content (or badly rendered book covers on devices like the Kindle). Again, it all depends on the format you're working with.

Jeremy Clark, Director of User Design at Adobe, was part of the team that created the much-hyped for the iPad. Adobe started working on a digitized Wired app before the iPad came out, and when it did, Clark said they knew it would change everything. One of Adobe's goals was to preserve the distinctive visual identity of the print magazine, while taking advantage of interactive features like video, 3D modeling and internet connectivity.

Given that the Wired app quickly became a standard by which other magazine apps were measured, I'd say Adobe achieved its goal.

Craig Mod took an entirely different approach to this subject; he spoke about the print book as a necessary physical reflection of our digital lives. When you're working constantly with digital content, "your frame of reference is very thin," said Mod.

Mod worked for a year with a team of developers to create an iPhone app called Flipboard. Over the course of the development process, the team created thousands of sketches and designs, wrote thousands of lines of code, and took hundreds of pictures. All of their work was stored in digital folders on a cloud server. A digital folder with 5 gigabytes of content, Mod pointed out, looks the same as a digital folder with 5 megabytes in it. You lose your frame of reference. But a book with 500 pages looks different than a book with 50 pages.

To preserve his experience with Flipboard, and as a kind of tribute to the year of work, Mod created a print book that contained each and every piece of content that the team had created. We need things with "boundaries and edges that a human being can parse," he concluded.

About the Author

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By Hannah Johnson The reading experience on a Kindle is like "reading through a tub full of dirty dishwater," said book designer Carin Goldberg at an event entitled "The Next Chapter: The Design and Publishing of the Digital Book." E-books, and the endless uniformity of their reflowable text, are some of the most egregious offenders of bad aesthetics.

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Front row: the art of book cover design (2014) interview  

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Front row: the art of book cover design (2014) interview  

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John Wilson interview: he asks if the art of book cover design is being relegated to a footnote in the history of print.
2:45 - Julian barnes. "it is a beautiful object. and if the physical book, as we've come to call it, resists the challenge of the e-book, it has to look like something worth having and worth keeping."
19:57 - Ian McEwan. speaks about how you don't have to buy a book necessarily because of its cover but it raises morale of the publishing house, production team and book sellers.
23:40 - Gabby Wood. the importance of physicality. like clothing, pictures on a wall or photographs, an e-book can't remind you of a time in your life or who you were.
ownership doesn't exist with the digital. printing turns abstract words into a tangible object.
27:28 Matthew Young. (cover designer at penguin) with a paperback every time you interact with the book, you see the cover. they become intertwined with each other in your mind and with e-books that is not the case.
you'll always need designers even with e-books.

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Learning on Screen - The British Universities and Colleges Film and Video Council

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fantastic book cover designer who has designed for Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, William Dobson and more.

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is the creative director at penguin random house and has been designing book covers for decades.

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Folio Society
Sternberg press
Strelka press
- find some children's one

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eye mag article about Hansje's process and work

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graphic designer and typography artist
"She works digitally, creating intricate typographic experiments that explore the tension between a systematic approach, legibility and irregularity. "
look at her inspirations and how she combined digital and traditional techniques.

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need to pick one idea and go with it- look at book covers (novels)
look into designers and the way they design and combine text and illustration. - Hansje, Mike Dempsey blog, eye mag, journal of illustration, Chip Kidd, Martin salisbury.- history of the illustrated book jacket.
Also look at the UK and international market is now - is it becoming more digital, is it dying, how has covid affected it.

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IDEA 3: the balance of digital and analogue processes within experimental animation (June)

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IDEA 3: the balance of digital and analogue processes within experimental animation (June)

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Thorough research and explanaiation of history of animation - establish meaning of 'experimental'

stuff to look into:
Walter Benjamin - digital art

inch cider advert (combines adobe after effects and hand drawn) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWNSHAV7Lyg

traditional vs digital blog - https://cie.acm.org/blog/traditional-animation-vs-digital/index.html

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/56362114.pdf - cutout animation. Helpful references

Digital techniques mimicking the traditional

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IDEA 2: The relationship between feminism and animation/illustration (June)

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IDEA 2: The relationship between feminism and animation/illustration (June)

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Explain brief history of animation/illustration. (eg. Old Disney, old fairytale books, first appearances of experimental animation.),

If animation: mention the invention of computing, code and the rise of this to produce animations (ada lovelace/charles babbage)

Explain brief history of feminism (all the different waves)

Cyberfeminism?

Link the 2 together. Manifestation of societal female views in mainstream animation. Also talk about representation of women and the female body/male gaze in animation. Discuss womens roles/jobs in animation industry.

Talk about the future of feminism and how illustration and animation can help with this – internet (vimeo, youtube, Instagram), technology, covid= socially distanced and more animation.

Book: experimental and expanded animation by vicki smith and nicky Hamlyn (suzan pitt, mushi, Miwa Matreyek

Book: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/e470ccff-3956-4d2e-b0da-7e10d70257f7/1004320.pdf

Book: experimental animation: from analogue to digital (part III, chapter 7)

https://www.shethepeople.tv/blog/evolution-feminism-animated-films/

https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/why-is-there-a-lack-of-women-in-animation-internationalwomensday-080318

http://www.beefbristol.org/go-go-go-women-in-experimental-animation-an-essay-by-vicky-smith/

REALLY good examples here: https://submarinechannel.com/top5/feminist-animations/

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Idea 1: how illustration and design influence the way we interpret and interact with stuff (June)

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Idea 1: how illustration and design influence the way we interpret and interact with stuff (June)

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History of design and its relevant uses – advertising, childrens books, book covers,

Use of colour palettes, colour theory, colour in childrens books & animations. impact on consumer psychology or behaviour, the effect colours have when reading, baker miller pink

Book covers https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-book-cover

http://theworldsgreatestbook.com/judging-book-cover-design-3/

Book: Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics. Furniss, M. (1998). Book: A Companion to Illustration : Art and Theory by alan male - page 354. Childrens books and illustrations.

Book: visual research by ian noble

Book: information is beautiful by David McCandless

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Future of traditional illustration/processes in an increasingly globalised/online/instant gratification world

the importance of art schools in modern society/ increasingly globalised society? -

bauhaus,

Bauhaus- a study on a specific person and how they have impacted the way we design now eg. Annie albers, a woman (all bauhaus women?)

The relationship between feminism and animation/illustration - or both?

Authorship, ownership, copyright and use of illustration online/in society

Environmental concerns and the power of illustration. How can illustration impact the increasing attitudes towards being eco-friendly?

The future of colour theory - is there one?

How covid pandemic affected illustration

How design and layout influence the way we read and interpret text

Role of animation in the future of book publishing

Portraying emotion in 2d or stop motion animation

the rise of Adobe After Effects and its uses in modern day animatation/ the future of animation