Chat Room- Checking In on E-books for Kids
But you can't check them out yet
By Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2002
When 2001 began, many librarians were under the impression that e-books might replace print books as the next big, new format. Every professional conference had a jammed-to-the-rafters session discussing electronic books.
Now, just one year later, all the fuss seems laughable. E-book vendor netLibrary, although still hanging on by its fingernails, has fallen on hard times and seems close to a deal with OCLC. Nobody bought the vast majority of e-books offered on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites. The RCA Gemstar reader (the former RocketBook—remember that?) never clicked with the reading public. And, more to the point, there weren't many e-book offerings for kids or young adults to really attract librarians' notice—titles such as the most recent Newbery or Printz award winners.
Until now.
A few months ago, both Random House and Scholastic announced that they were getting serious about electronic books. Random House's line of juvenile e-books, called RandomView (www.randomhouse.com/kids/randomview), includes Christopher Paul Curtis's Newbery Award–winning Bud, Not Buddy and Philip Pullman's Amber Spyglass —each for $3.99. Scholastic offered for a time a free download of A Time for Courage, a "Dear America" series title by Kathryn Lasky, several months before its paper publication. To read it, I had to download a copy of the free Adobe eBook Reader, available through Scholastic's site (www.scholastic.com). Once downloaded to a computer, the free e-book (as well as the ones you'll pay for) can be read only on that particular PC. It can't be loaned, which, of course, is a real problem for libraries. Random House and Scholastic marketing folks said they're investigating ways that libraries could circulate the electronic books, but I didn't get a feeling we'll see these new kids' e-books in library catalogs any time soon.
Michael Jacobs, senior vice-president of Scholastic's trade division, admitted that the company is experimenting, trying to draw attention to e-books by offering some of them free, and waiting to see if people buy. "Remember, 35,000 people downloaded the preview volume of [K. A. Applegate's] new science fiction series, 'Remnants.'" Most of them, Jacobs pointed out, were young fans. But here's the catch: the Applegate book was free, and it wasn't yet available in print. If I picture anyone reading electronic fiction, I picture teens doing it. But so far, teens say they're sticking to paper versions.
Sharyn November, senior children's/young adult editor at Puffin and Viking, is no slouch in using the Web, running her own site (www.sharyn.org). When I asked her about e-books for teens, though, she seemed underwhelmed. "None of the teens I know read e-books," she says. "They read book books." She asked the teens with whom she corresponds online for their thoughts about consuming literature electronically. Their responses revealed that most of the teens do what we adults do. A 12-year-old wrote, "I don't read any lengthy texts on line. Anything more than six or seven pages, I print out." A 15-year-old said, "No, I don't read e-books; I really don't think I'd enjoy staring at a computer screen for too long."
Marc Aronson, author of Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado (Dutton, 2000), doesn't think e-books will succeed if they're only a substitute for print books. He believes that electronic resources are proving themselves as reference resources. But he also says, "We know paper books; we like them; we are comfortable using them; [and] we have no desire to replace them."
Right now, we have no evidence that children and teens want to lose themselves in thousands of words of narrative on a screen. The resolution of a typical screen just doesn't offer a worthy enough visual alternative. Maybe things will change when electronic paper arrives; the technology exists now to cover a sheet of paper with microscopic half-white, half-black particles that respond to an electric charge. We will someday be able to read the entire New York Times (or SLJ, or Little Women ) on a single sheet of electronic paper. That experience may be similar to reading a conventional newspaper or book. But we won't see e-paper for sale for another two or three years. Perhaps America's readers will be happy to wait.
