eBook Review: Green Eggs and Ham

Green Eggs and Ham
Oceanhouse Media
$3.99 from Amazon App Store
Read on Kindle Fire

Green Eggs and Ham!  I'm trying to like them, Sam I am!

This is the same people who did Rudolph.  So.  Some of the same stuff stands.  Kinda creepy, annoying narrator and those big red words that pop out when you click on pictures.  It's psychedelically annoying.  I might just be a party pooper about this, but I'd rather have some of other kind of interaction.  They sell this book for $3.99 on name recognition, mostly.

The problem is, my kid LOVES this.  He asks for Sam-I-am and loves the train going through the tunnel and the accompanying choo choo sounds.  He points out the eggs, he points out the ham, and he says "I do not like them, Sam-I-am!" at dinner when I'm trying to get him to eat something green.  We have a few Dr Seuss compilations that we read from, so he recognizes the art and the cadence.

I'd rather listen to Moxy Fruvous than read this eBook, but I'm not the boss of me.  My 2 year old is.

eArticle: Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad

Check out Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A to hear the story of the phenomenon that knocked publishers on their patoots in 2010.  Stevens shares how a fortuitous combination of unemployment, hard work and technical skills resulted in the development of a new, interactive format that sparked a mad rush to get on the interactive eBook bandwagon.  He gives a scathing overview of the eBook industry:

What’s happening at the moment is that most publishers are handing their major titles over to app developers who are ruining these titles with rushed, unprofessional layout and design. There is this weird situation where programmers are suddenly being given free rein to design books. We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers who—despite their excellence at programming—are not designers. The complete lack of care and attention paid to the production of digital books is genuinely mystifying.

He does, however, give props to Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime (which we will review shortly), and tells about some new projects he has been working on.  I can't wait to read Alice in New York!

eArticle Review: For Reading and Learning, Kids Prefer E-Books to Print Books

In a study of 24 families with children ranging from three to six years old, researchers from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center found that children prefer reading an e-book to a print book. Comprehension was the same with both, with the exception of enhanced e-books. Enhanced e-books with games and other interactive elements hindered comprehension of the story. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center plans larger studies on the issue. The article continues with a discussion of the children’s e-book and app market. Concerns are raised about a possible digital divide with disadvantaged children not having access to e-books. In conclusion, experts and publishers agree that getting a child interested in reading is the important thing, not the format of the book.

Posted by Leslie McNabb

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: Fire Truck

Fire Truck by Ivan Ulz has been a favourite in our house for quite some time.  It only occurred to me recently that it could be considered an eBook. Slippery things, these eBooks, aren't they?  It was part of a series of  tree books  called "Sing and Read Storybooks" published by Scholastic.  This particular book is out of print, but there are others in the serious that are still available. (On a side note, the Scholastic website is TERRIBLE for searching.  And there is no link for this series of books.  They have got to get some librarians to work on that.)

The illustrations are great and contain all the requisite parts that make preschoolers go wild: ladders, hoses, spotted canines, wheels, bells and sirens.  There's a reason this video has been watched nearly 3 million times- the little dudes dig it.

The song sounds monotonous on first listen, but once you've heard it a few times, it gets kinda groovy.  And you know what's even groovier?  When you're driving in your car, and a firetruck drives by, and your kid starts belting it out from the back seat.

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.

ebook Review: I Love You, Daddy

Anyone who has been to my storytimes knows what a softie I am for books about Mama or Daddy Love.  You know, those overly sentimental books that make you feel all squishy inside about your kid and make you temporarily forget about all the concerts and bars you could be going to if you weren't on potty duty.

This is one of those books.  I Love You, Daddy is adorable.  I may have even gotten a little weepy at the end.  Beautiful watercolours, beautiful text and positive parenting are all present.  Unfortunately, there are no interactive features, and the only option is Read by Myself.  I would be really pleased with this eBook- except for the fact that I actually paid $2.99 for it.  If you have to pay something, there SHOULD be interactive content.  Otherwise, you may as well just read one of those old fashioned books.  The ones that take up space on shelves, collect dust and have to be shipped from Asia.

eBook Review: The Journey of the Noble Gnarble

The Journey of the Noble Gnarble is an epic tale of a little gnarble realizing his dreams and finding his way to the surface of the ocean in spite of  the dire predictions of naysaying blyfish.  He avoids being eaten by hungry warckel and a silver subbalubble,  but he does get eaten by a plink.  Our brave protagonist uses his gnarble noggin to get himself free, and finally reaches the surface.  On the last page he "flipped above the waves and smiled at the sun."  There are pterodactyl-type creatures flying above the surface of the waves, and my fatalistic little brain totally expected the gnarble to get gobbled up just as he achieved his goal.

We downloaded this book from B&N and read it on the Nook Color.   There is no interactivity,  but the illustrations are gorgeous and the rhyme is decent.  The audio sounded like someone recorded it on a tape recorder, and the narrator spoke in a  boring monotone.  She gives the blyfish a really horrible English accent.  Read this out loud to your older preschooler for best results.

A nice bit of wisdom from the Noble Gnarble:

The gnarble knew he'd come too close
to quit and give up now
"there must be some way out of here,
there's got to be somehow!"

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.

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!)

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 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

How do we feel about eBooks?

I posted this question on facebook last night:


What kind of eReader does everyone have? do you do any reading on a multi-purpose device like an iPad, smart phone or jo schmo laptop?


In 21 hours I got 31 responses (and counting), all from people telling me how much they love their eReaders.  Kindles, iPads, iPhones, Sony eReaders, Android phones, Playbook etc.


A few minutes later I posted this:


Does anyone use an eReader (ipad/pod/phone) with kids?


I got a response that said "I read an article that said parents use real books with kids because of the tactile effect."  


ONE person responded.


When I discussed this with a book-loving friend of mine, she said that eBooks for children sound vaguely unwholesome.  Is this true?


We are very willing to consume eBooks ourselves, and play show and tell with our fancy gadgets, but we shut the party down when little Bobby pokes his head around the corner.  Why?


eBooks for children: a brave new world.  Let's talk about it!