Studies that aim to answer the question of whether a child gets a different experience from a book than an e-book are just getting under way. Studies of how such a device affects the development of young children typically take three to five years.
When a parent reads a physical book to a child, the child tends to take away more of the actual content, because the conversation between parent and child is most likely about what’s happening in the story. A recent study found that children using electronic console books that have buttons, tended to learn navigation, such as what different buttons do. Instead of talking about the content parents said things like “don’t touch that yet.”
