eArticle Review: E-Book Lending Lures Readers Back to Libraries

eBook Lending Lures Readers Back to Libraries

How awesome is this?  People are reading MORE.  Not just more eBooks or more print books or more cereal boxes- just MORE.  Nothing but good could come of this.  Unless maybe you're a publisher.  And you're using yesterday's rules to play today's game. Then you deserve what's coming to you.

The increased digital demand doesn’t seem to affect the volume of physical book-borrowing. “We still have growing circulation numbers in regular books as well, so it’s like two worlds that run side by side,” said Jim Charette of the Portland Public Library. 

In fact, the growing prevalence of tablets and smartphones appears to be drawing people back to reading as a leisure-time activity. 

Following the national trend, libraries are harnessing digital technology to the benefit of their patrons. If customers continue to flock to libraries, publishers may be left with no choice but to follow

eBook Review: Axel the Truck: Rocky Road

We used a Nook Color to read Axel the Truck: Rocky Road.  It was free, which is always a good start.  The writing is not terribly sophisticated( "Axel is a red truck. Axel has big, big wheels."), but there are sound effects, onomatopoeia, repetition and lots of action. And, of course, it is a story about a monster truck, which lends a lot of credence to its literary merit in the eyes of my 2.25 year old.

The reader is given the Read to Me/Read it Myself option, but there isn't any interactivity.  The narrator isn't annoying; I daresay he was almost pleasant to listen to.  Reading this book to ourselves felt just like reading a paper book: the screen displays two pages at a time,; you turn those pages with a swipe; you read the text, look at the picture and move on.  It's the same content; it just arrives in a different vehicle.  Ba doom boom.

In other news, Axl Rose isn't looking so hot these days.

Nook Color

I used my charm and wit to borrow a Nook Color so I could review some books on it.  After using the Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the Nook Color felt a little clunky.  Scrolling through the B&N store was choppy, and turning pages was slow.  This is an older device, however, and the Nook Tablet is apparently much smoother.  The display changed from portrait to landscape when going from the bookshelf to the book, and can't toggle back and forth between the two.  Not that this mattered much- that's how I would have used it anyway, but the other devices I use respond to the way I hold them.  I don't see why someone would pay $199 for this when they could get the tablet for $249, but I will report back once I've actually had a chance to play with the Nook Tablet.

Welcome, Amber!

Little eLit is very proud to welcome Amber as a guest blogger.  Amber is a library superhero with an encyclopedic knowledge of children's music (and all music, for that matter...)  She is quick to whip out her iPhone and say "I have an App for that!" and she kicks some serious patoot in storytime.  Also,  she laughs at all my stupid jokes.  I can't wait to see what she's going to tell us about in her upcoming post.

Jazz hands and golf claps for Amber!

Libraries Get the Shaft in Otherwise Cool Book

I just started reading John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (review to come).

It depresses me that I didn't have to read any further than page 2 to hear libraries being slammed:

[Digital natives] study, work, write and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways you did growing up.  They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. they probably don't even know what a library card looks like; and if they do, they've probably never used it.

DAMN!  OUCH!  BLARG!

That hits right where it hurts.  Granted, this book was written in 2008 (that's TOTALLY ancient), and I don't remember seeing either of the authors at CLA this year to see all the cool stuff lots of public libraries are doing for these digital natives.  We're working on it, guys!

I held regular teen craft nights in my branch where we made duct tape iPod protectors.  We're acquiring all sorts of eReaders in my current library to train the staff with so they know what to do when someone comes in and says "I can't get this eBook to work!" We're working on changing the minds of the more conservative librarians who think that all a library will ever need to provide for young people is books and storytimes.  We're facebooking, tweeting, blogging, chat referencing and tumblring.  We're LMFAOing.  We're pimping our iPhones right along with our bookcarts.

But we can't compete with Amazon, iTunes, Google, B&N, The Pirate Bay or all sorts of other providers of digital entertainment when it comes to ease and convenience.  Not yet.  We need some of those digital natives to infiltrate the publishers to make it a little easier to lend digital content.

UPDATE:

Page 8 says this:

Librarians, too, are reimagining their role: Instead of primarily organizing book titles in musty card catalogs and shelving the books in the stacks, they serve as guides to an increasingly variegated information environment.

Ok, they get points for the "increasingly variegated information environment" bit, but these dudes must be old.  Card catalogues?  Librarians shelving books? That's just crazy talk.

All in the Family with Media Literacy

I don't know why, but it floored me when my 3 year old niece efficiently navigated her way through YouTube on an iMac to find her favourite song.  Not only was I impressed by her impeccable taste in music, but also the ease with which she used the Magic Trackpad and keyboard.  She wasn't zoning out in front of a TV; she was actively using her technological knowhow to fill an information need.  She found what she wanted, grooved a little, moved away from the computer and proceeded to sit on her brother and play with some marbles.

This is media literacy!  This is where success starts!  At a very young age, in the home.  It got me thinking about kids who DON'T have new fangled technology in their homes. Libraries have to get on board and find a way to make these gadgets accessible to everyone.  How do we do that?  Music, books, videos, then homework, bus schedules, job applications and driver's licenses... it's all on the interwebs.  

We have to get some have to the have nots.

eArticle Review: Publishers vs. Libraries: An E-Book Tug of War

Publishers can be such buzz killers. This is what we're dealing with in the library world these days:

LAST year, Christmas was the biggest single day for e-book sales by HarperCollins. And indications are that this year’s Christmas Day total will be even higher, given the extremely strong sales of e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook. Amazon announced on Dec. 15 that it had sold one million of its Kindles in each of the three previous weeks.But we can also guess that the number of visitors to the e-book sections of public libraries’ Web sites is about to set a record, too. And that is a source of great worry for publishers. In their eyes, borrowing an e-book from a library has been too easy.

Too easy? They have completely tied our hands with regards to lending eBooks. OverDrive is such a DRM racket and it's the only player on the field at the moment. There is so little available for library patrons and it's so hard to get to.

*angry noise*

Check out some of the comments on Slashdot. I like this one:

Authors and editors are valuable, but publishers are basically parasites nowadays.

eBook Review: Barnyard Dance

Stomp your feet and clap your hands! Everybody ready for a Barnyard Dance!

When Sandra Boynton tells us to stomp and clap, we say HOW LOUD?  We took this eBook for a swing around the pigpen on our brand spanking new Galaxy Nexus.  We chose the "The big guy reads it" option, which is much more fun than the "I want to read it myself" option because it's sung the whole way through.  If you don't do your pauses right it can feel awkward. I find this with a lot of Sandra Boynton's work, but it's sacrilegious to say such things in public so I keep my big trap shut most of the time.  Trust me- it's better to have some lightly animated cow read it to you so it's done right.

Extras included dancing bovines, ungulates and fowl (bowing, spinning, bouncing, walking in a line), interactive foliage, tilt-sensor egg shells and animal sounds galore.  I found the pages a little hard to turn, especially for little fingers.  You have to be very precise with your swiping, and it's too easy to hit the "do it again" button instead.  At the end of the book there is a deck of cards with covers from other Boynton books, which I assumed would take me to the Market so I could purchase them too, but that was not the case.  Take my money, darnit!

You can see a trailer of this eBook here.

eBook Review: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

I love free stuff.  And this eBook was free from the Amazon App Store.  This eBook is best enjoyed with a big mug full of rum-spiked eggnog.  Or something a little stronger.

There are 3 options for this one: Auto Play, Read to Me and Read it Myself.  I did the Read to Me option, and I managed to be only slightly heebie-jeebied by the talking snowman.

You can click on the illustrations once creepy snowman dude stops narrating and you are rewarded with the spoken and written identification of whatever object you tapped.  Not enough of the objects are labeled, however.  I would have gotten a kick out of hearing the snowman say "Reindeer Butt."

This nostalgic tale of stymied conformity contains vocabulary like "Red Schnoz" and a suspiciously gay-looking elf named Hermey who hates making toys and wants to be a dentist.  Rudolph and Hermey run away from home and encounter a prospector named Yukon Cornelius; the Abominable Snow Monster; and King Moonracer (the flying lion who rules the land of the misfit toys).  The plot is nutty, the characters fickle and there is a terrible ripping sound effect as Hermey the gay dentist elf extracts the Abominable Snow Monster's teeth (after he dropped a huge chunk of ice on its head).

What on earth were they on when they made this?   I LOVE it!!!  But I will NOT be reading it with my progeny until he's old enough to discuss concepts like narrative structure.  Or the lack thereof.

 (I couldn't make this stuff up, it's too good!)

Free Rudolph App Today!

Amazon App store offering Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for FREE today!!!

Like them on facebook and they will tell you what their free App of the day is.

eBook Review: A Charlie Brown Christmas

It's Christmas Eve, y'all!  I took the plunge and shelled out some actual dough to buy A Charlie Brown Christmas.  I am glad I did.  For my hard-earned money I got to witness my favourite melancholy youngster bemoaning his lack of Christmas cheer, then finding it again by being whacked on the head with a little religion (yeah, it's a little heavy handed, but I'm trying not to be all Scrooge McDuck about it).

Extras included a game of collecting Christmas ornaments throughout the book, snowflakes that go POP and crystalize, and pop-up style characters that do funny things like sigh or wiggle when you tap them.  There is also finger painting, piano playing, angry-birds style snowball throwing and Lucy saying "Look Charlie, Let's face it. We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket!"

I had fun clicking on words to make the bored sounding computer voice make sentences that made no sense, and Little J really got the hang of turning pages.

Spring for this App, snuggle up with your kid and be jolly, eBook style.

Happy Whatever Holiday You Celebrate When It Gets Cold, everyone!

iTunes
Android 

eArticle review: Digital literacy crucial early in life, educators say

Faith Rogow, the founding president of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, which we looked at a little here made a presentation recently at an Early Childhood Education conference put on by the Pittsburg Association for the Education of Young Children.  The Tribune Review wrote a nice little article about it here.

In this new world, "what does it mean to be literate?" Rogow asked the 200 teachers attending the daylong symposium on Friday. 

Reading and writing are part of the answer, she said. But so is the ability to navigate the new media landscape. For early education teachers, it means preparing youngsters "for the world they actually live in," Rogow said -- the world of interactive, instant communication and information-gathering.

This conference was aimed at early childhood educators, but many of the programs were presented by librarians.  Check out the conference brochure.  I wish I could have been there!  I am contacting a few of the presenters to pick their brains and find out when they will next be speaking somewhere on my side of the continent. 


Programs I would have loved to have sat in on:
There's an App for That: Selecting Quality Children's Books in E-book Format by Tess Reismeyer
The Library Online Playground by Caralee Sommerer & Megan Fogt
Using Media & Technology Tools in the Early Childhood Classroom by Michael Robb

ALSC Blog Literacy App Review

Kiera Parrott, the librarian who told us about the Darien Library's circulating Early Literacy iPad kits has now posted something else on the ALSC blog: Five Great Apps for Under-Fives.  These apps are not free, but she includes some favorites like Peter Rabbit and Moo, Baa, La La La.  Take a look and load up your iPad with some good electronic early literacy content.  Then come over to my place and let me play with the iPad.

Touch and Go eBook Reviews

School Library Journal provides all sorts of reviews for all sorts of good stuff, but what's really exciting is their Touch and Go blog, which reviews apps and eBooks for kids and teens.   I usually look at the Preschool-Grade 4 posts, and there are quite a few holiday titles reviewed on there at the moment.  Often the products reviewed are not available for free, but they're not prohibitively expensive.  I'm even tempted to buy A Charlie Brown Christmas for the Galaxy Tab, even for $6.99.  One pet peeve about this blog is that they don't have links to the marketplace for the items, so you have to do all that pesky copying, pasting and searching to take a gander at what they're talking about.

App Review: Fruit Book

Fruit Book is a free, simple app that kept Little J interested for beyond what I would have expected, which was wonderful because we endured airplane travel today. You have 2 options: Learn or Quiz.  On Learn mode, you see a picture of a type of fruit (barberries, cacao, cherimoya and olives included) and the name of the fruit both written and spoken.  You go through the fruits alphabetically, navigating with arrows or swiping.  That in itself was enough to keep us going for awhile: at least as long as it took for the flight attendants to go from peanuts to beverages.    In Quiz mode, you are given 4 pictures of fruit and the pleasant but disembodied voice says the name of one.  If you tap on the correct fruit, you are rewarded with canned applause and a green check mark.  If you tap less correct fruit, there is a scary buzzer noise and a big red X.  Little J declined to play the quiz game after getting a few fruits incorrect.  Good fun and worth the price.

eBook Review: Mud Puddle

Title: Mud Puddle

Author: Robert Munsch

Illustrator: Sami Suomalainen

Narrator: Robert Munsch

Publisher: Annick Press

Provider: TumbleBooks

Age: K-3

Robert Munsch is a multi-talented fellow.  He writes funny books that keep both little monsters and little mamas entertained, and then he narrates said books with aplomb.  This book is about a little girl who gets dressed in her nice clean clothes and plays innocently in her backyard.  A  mud puddle jumps on her head numerous times, and excessive bathing and dressing ensue until Jule Ann puts the smack down on the mud puddle with 2 bars of stinky yellow soap.  Munsch's bathtime sound effects are hilarious.  I will use them the next time a mud puddle jumps on Little J and I need to scrub him down. 

I tried the word search game that's included with this TumbleBook, and I was really disappointed.  You are given a sentence from the book and asked to fill in the word, and if the word you type is incorrect it says something like "You're an idiot!  Do you want to try again?" and your answer, of course, is "No, I don't want to try again, I want to cry."  I think Tumblebooks is trying to get on board the interactivity wagon but hasn't quite gotten there yet.

Google Books Flop

For the first time today we tried to access some eBooks on my LG Optimus S. I Shelled out 99 cents to purchase the Complete Works of Beatrix Potter via Google Books only to find that none of the illustrations were included.  No good for 2 year olds who want to see some Tittlemouse.

I also purchased Curious George and the Hot Air Balloon because there were very few other children's books to choose from.  I was reminded how much I dislike Curious George's preachiness and post-colonial ickyness.  eBook or paper, some white dude is still "civilizing" a monkey.  And since it was Google Books, it was a digitized copy of a print book, unzoomable, with the original text in place but unreadable on our small screen.  Some pages had the text transcribed, but often the text included did not correspond to the pictures.  Not the sophisticated experience we were hoping for.

Darien Library's Early Literacy iPad Kit

I found a great post on the ALSC blog that describes an Early Literacy iPad Kit lending program at the Darien Library in Darien, CT.  They've got all sorts of resources for Digital Literacy.  Great quote from the article:

In conjunction with traditional book-sharing between child and parent, devices like the iPad can boost early literacy skill-building as well as stimulate visual and media literacy development

What a forward thinking library!  What a marvelous program!  There were 46 holds on the 6 items available. 

This kit includes an iPad 2 pre-loaded with librarian-selected apps and eBooks designed to stimulate early literacy skills in preschool age children. Also included is information for parents on using technology with young children, screentime, evaluating apps for children, and a list of the selected apps. The kit may be borrowed for one week by a parent or caregiver of children ages 2 to 5.  

 I think I need to seek some grant funding...

eBook Review: All Aboard the Dinotrain!

Title: All Aboard the Dinotrain

Author: Deb Lund

Illustrator: Howard Fine

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Provider: TumbleBooks

Age: K-3

OMG!  DINOSAURS AND TRAINS!

We don't really need a review for this one, obviously,  because of the following equation:

dinosaurs + trains = awesome

(We'll do a review anyway cuz that's how we roll)

Deb Lund and Howard Fine do a decent enough job of this only slightly awkwardly rhyming romp through a land where dinosaurs ride on top of trains and end up being tossed into a gorge without anyone being hurt.  Herbivores and carnivores co-exist peacefully, one of the brontosaurs has a beehive hairdo,  and "dino" exists as a prefix that can be added to any lexical category.  Kirkus called this book a "hilarious new brouhaha" while PW states that it's "dino-mite."  It translates well into an eBook, too, what with all the "roller coaster dinoride" action.  The animation is a bit choppy at times, but that may have been done purposely to kick things up a notch when the train barrels down a hill and magically flies across a collapsed trestle.  There's a "we think we can!" nod to Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could , but All Aboard the Dinotrain won't be a classic.

An interesting note in Tumblebooks- if you pause the eBook, some of the animation remains- in this case, smoke from the smokestack kept billowing as Little J and I readjusted ourselves on the couch.  We used the Kindle Fire for this one, and it didn't display well.  The Tumblebooks dashboard takes up too much space and I couldn't get rid of the address bar or the tabs in the browser.

Amazon acquired Marshall Cavendish US Children’s Books Titles

Amazon is going to convert the whole catalogue of Marshall Cavendish's children's books (mostly picture books) into eBooks.

Anybody want to play Monopoloy?

Read more here.

eBook Vocabulary: Media Literacy

Well, whaddya know!  There is an entire professional organization dedicated to Media Literacy.  The National Association for Media Literacy Education publishes the Journal of Media Literacy Education and provides us with a handy dandy definition.


"Media literacy [consists] of a series of communication competencies, including the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, and COMMUNICATE information in a variety of forms, including print and non-print messages."


Whoa.  Ok.  That's very broad.  Luckily they break down the definition further:

• Media refers to all electronic or digital means and print or artistic visuals used to transmit messages.
• Literacy is the ability to encode and decode symbols and to synthesize and analyze messages.
• Media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols transmitted via media and the ability to synthesize, analyze and produce mediated messages.
• Media education is the study of media, including ‘hands on’ experiences and media production.
• Media literacy education is the educational field dedicated to teaching the skills associated with media literacy.

But- it's not really literacy, is it?

Yes!  It is!  Media literacy comprises much more than the linear orthographical decoding of yesteryear.  Our kids are digital natives who need to know how to comprehend and utilize multi-sensory information from all different types of devices.  Words, images and sound are all legitimate purveyors of information requiring different skills for processing.


In order for kids to become useful people in our increasingly digital world, they're going to have to be proficient not only in using current technology, but in figuring out new technology as it becomes available.  Traditional literacy was basically a skill that you learned once and you were set for life; media literacy is a wider set of continually evolving, increasingly sophisticated skills.


So how does this relate to eBooks?  
Reading eBooks together is an awesome way to give our little monsters the skills to figure out what they're going to need to know in our big bad world of sensory overload.  If we can give them good quality eLiterature with well designed multimedia extras we start them on the path to media literacy.  

eArticle review: The Children's eBook Revisited

In my last post I mused about what an eBook actually is.  Warren Buckleitner has some ideas on the topic.  This article was published in 2011, and is based on data collected between April and December of 2010, which means the information is obsolete now, given how fast eBook technology is changing.  Let's take a look anyway, just for kicks.

This peer-reviewed article gives a snapshot of eBooks for kids.  It includes an eBook Glossary of Terms and a (little too much) history about eBooks.  

The author makes a distinction between eReaders and Animated Stories.  This is confusing for me because I think of eReaders as being the device upon which you view an eBook, but I do see what he's getting at.  Many of the eBooks we've read are basically just digitized versions of a print book with some minor animation, highlighted text and audio.  Here's what he says the differences are:

eReaders

Less interactive
Easier to adapt from a print book 
A PDF file is the most common and least interactive examples of an eReader. 
Features might include:
• Font control (color, shape & size) 
• Navigation helpers (tilt, page swiping, screen rotation) 
• Word search features (ability to type a word, and jump to the word). 
• Minimal frosting (e.g., hidden animations, popups or activities) 
• Cut and copy to your clipboard. 
• Hyperlinks, both internal and external. 
• Decoding helpers (narration, word highlighting, pronunciation, language toggling and/or translation).


Animated Stories
More interactive
Many offer two modes: Read to Me (narrated text) or Read it Myself (just text).
The author claims that the interactivity in animated stories is based on Apple's 8 pillars of the iPad:
1. A large multi-touch screen that can register multiple fingers at once, as well as how hard the fingers are pushing and in what direction
2. Motion detection in the form of a tilt or a shake
3. Microphone captures your voice for story narration
4. Cameras that can be used for scanning bar codes or seeing pictures
5. Speakers
6. Long lasting batteries and enough internal memory to store hundreds of apps
7. Internet access that is fast, free (if you are in a Wi-Fi zone) and smart
8. Apps

What I found most interesting about this article was the author's analysis of the various interactivity techniques commonly used in animated stories (hot spots, hunt and find, motion based input and motion tabs).  In the "academic disclaimer" at the beginning of the article, Buckleitner states that "the definition of 'literacy' goes beyond decoding and encoding," and goes on to describe how this new fangled medium is not just entertainment, but rather an important pedagogical and diagnostic tool in literacy and language education.  The multimedia environment provided by eBooks (animated stories, potato, potahto) can not only support traditional literacy development through the use of built-in dictionaries, language toggles, highlighting or sound-it-out functions; but also the development of what we now call multiliteracy, or media literacy.  But that's a whole other discussion.

Buckleitner, W. (2011). THE CHILDREN'S EBOOK REVISITED. Children's Technology Review, 19(1), 6.

I don't read eBooks with my kid! Oh wait! Yes I do!

I had a lovely chance meeting with a good friend of mine and her 4 year old daughter today.  We discussed our use of eBooks with our respective progeny.

"We don't really use eBooks.  Oh wait! Yes we do! We downloaded this one ages ago.  Here Maryanne, show us how you find Lulu's Brew!" said Mom.

Maryanne went on to navigate her mom's iPhone, find the app, start it up, then turn pages to show me how it worked.  They DO read eBooks, they just didn't think of it that way.

When I asked where she got it and if she paid for it, she had no idea.  It was just like any other app on her phone- something had tickled her fancy and she clicked on it.

Why the disjunct? Is it a matter of nomenclature?  Is "ebook" too narrow?  Too broad? Too jargony?  Do people use this stuff with their kids without knowing that some library nincompoop calls it an eBook?

What IS an eBook?

Hang tight.  I'm gonna figure it out.

eBook Review: Lola in the Library

After our disappointing experience with another library-themed eBook, I thought we should find a GOOD one to share.  I found an old favourite: Anna McQuinn and Rosalind Beardshaw's Lola at the Library.  We used TumbleBooks on our Galaxy Tab again.

I used to use a paper copy of this book with K-3 class visits at the library, and I was interested to see how it would be presented in eBook form.  I was pleasantly surprised with the pacing the narrator used- it was slow and articulate, performed in a style that emulates a child's speaking patterns.  Perfect for the text.

When presenting this book with school children I always skipped the page about Lola and her mom going for cappuccino after visiting the library. It seemed out of place then, but now that I have Little J I totally get it.  We go out for coffee before or after visiting the library, and I give him some foam off my mocha.  Art imitating life!

eBook Review: One Duck Stuck

Phyllis Root and Jane Chapman's One Duck Stuck is another wonderful storytime book, and it transfers very well to the eBook medium.  Repetitive text wears on adult ears after awhile, but Little J chimed in every time a new animal said "We can! We can!"

You know what they say about young children: "repetition is good, repetition is good, repetition is good!"

Cute illustrations, good rhythm and a funny twist at the end make this a sophisticated read for little ones, and caregivers can be happy with the inclusion of numerals and onomatopoeia. The narrator is quite animated and makes good use of her sibilants.

I thought there was too much of a time gap in the narration between the main text and the secondary text; you feel like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop until "Help! Help!" begins.

*****Spoiler Alert*****

Best part of the book?  The "SPLUCK!"