In the wake of my recent dinner where I watched a toddler use her mother’s hand as a stylus when reading an ebook on mom’s iPad, I’ve been interested in the interactivity of reading ebooks. Researchers at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, including my friend Ingrid Erickson (who I didn’t know worked on this kind of thing), have released a study comparing how books, e-books, and “enhanced e-books” are used in “co-reading”– that is, parents and young children reading books together. What they find:

1. Enhanced e-books are less effective than print and basic e-books in supporting the benefits of co-reading because they prompted more non-content related interactions…

2. Features of enhanced e-books may affect children’s ability to recall a story because both parents and children focus their attention on non-content, rather than story-related issues…

3. Print books were more advantageous for literacy-building co-reading, while e-books, particularly enhanced e-books, were more advantageous for engaging children and prompting physical interaction.

The second point doesn’t surprise me at all: all too often with multimedia we end up spending more time fiddling with controls or looking for what to click on next, and consequently pay less attention to narrative or content.

The whole report is here, and it’s pretty short, so it’s a quick read.