eBook Review: Dog Story: Learning Opposites

Dog Story: Learning Opposites is no great work of literature.

HOWEVER:

The interactivity of this eBook kept my 2 year old and me occupied for a very, very long time. You can choose Auto Play or Read to Me.  On each page you are presented with simple text like "This dog is big and this dog is small," with the respective canines pleasingly rendered with manipulatable doggy apparatuses such as bones, food bowls, trees (on which to pee, one would assume), newspapers, doghouses and balls.

Each page has a different schtick: a fence becomes a xylophone, flowers fall from the tree, the bones spin around.  You can tap on the dogs to see and hear the opposite words. You turn pages by tapping the purple arrows in the bottom corners, and there are buttons at the top left for repeating the narration and removing the text. The narrator has a calming voice and the music isn't annoying.  A great free app.  Available through iTunes too.

eBook Review: The Elephant's Child: How the Elephant Got His Trunk

This one's for you, Dad!  (My dad loves Rudyard Kipling)

The Elephant's Child: How the Elephant Got His Trunk is a free eBook from B&N.  The narrator is awesome.  He sounds like he should be narrating a PBS nature show.  About elephants.

Poor baby elephant has bad role models and absentee parents. All the animals of the savannah keep telling him to stop asking questions.

"So many questions! Take your nosy-nose somewhere else!"

The Kokoloko bird, channeling coyote or raven,  sends the little elephant off to go ask a crocodile what he eats for dinner.  CHOMP.  This is a slightly more violent tale than I would normally abide for my own little elephant, but it IS Rudyard Kipling, and he DOES hearken from the days of yore when cautionary tales were sprinkled with chomping crocodiles, child-eating witches and poisoned apples.  In the end, though, the elephant ends up with a dextrous schnozz and shares his story with the nasty creatures who wouldn't answer his questions earlier in the story.  Such is the love of a child.

FYI: Did you know that the term pachyderm is now obsolete?  It's true!  Wikipedia told me so.