Here’s Hoping e-Books Don’t Replace Children’s Books

By Kelly Turner on January 11th, 2010

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Amazon.com announced that their Kindle, an electronic reader, was the most gifted item in the company’s history.  This announcement solidifies the undeniable shift from paper books to e-books.

Electronic readers, or e-readers, are relatively new devices that allow you to download books and read the content right off the screen just as you would read the words off a page.  The Kindle is by far the most popular e-reader and retails for about $250. Other versions, like Sony’s Reader and Barnes and Noble’s Nook are comparably priced.

It’s still a little hazy about exactly where e-books will fit into the publishing world.  The worry is that e-readers will be the end of the publishing industry, and paper books, as we know it.  E-books can be released faster, for cheaper, making them the logical choice for consumers and many fear that the convenience of getting much anticipated books online before they are released in print will ruin sales.

E-readers are about the size of one small paperback book, but can hold approximately 200 non-illustrated books, replacing book shelves of novels and backpacks full of text books with one portable device.

I’m afraid technology will soon claim the life of another industry.  Many newspapers and magazines have shut their doors because of free and faster internet news sources.  Tangible CDs are becoming a thing of the past as you can carry around hundreds of CDs on your iPod, which is no bigger than a deck of cards.

Books will unfortunately be the next casualty of our incessant need of convenience, and quite possibly will be the most tragic thus far.  Books have long been revered as precious treasures to be collected, loved and revisited.  The stories inside of real and e-books will be the same, but experience of the book will be lost.  Nothing can replace cracking the spine of a fresh novel as you open it for the first time, turning and re-turning the crisp pages until they become dog-eared and soft, and taking off the jacket of a hardcover to not ruin its beautiful cover.

Discovering books is one of the most exciting parts of childhood.  It’s not just about learning to read, it’s about discovering the books themselves: the bright pictures, turning the pages, and how each on is unique in its own way.  Of course, there is that swelling feeling of satisfaction and pride when you read a book for the very first time, turning the pages as you go until you reach the end, even if you only have it memorized because it has been read to you so many times.

I just can’t picture a child getting excited about reading if their exposure to the unending world of literature is their parent curling up with them for a bedtime story, and asking them to scroll through the library of stories on their Kindle, after it’s done charging, of course.

I couldn’t get enough of books when I was a kid.  I loved the way they smelled.  I loved the way I could bend them to fit in my pocket as I climbed the tree in my backyard to read in its branches.  I loved looking for the tiny, barely visible red bugs that every so often live within the pages.  You don’t get that intimate experience with a hunk of metal and circuit boards.

E-readers and e-books are great.  They are a great step forward in technology and getting information to those who need it, faster, cheaper and easier.  I only hope that paper books can survive as e-books explode.  It’s not often that technology and classic mediums can coexist.  So often the “old school” version of things get squashed under the tiny, sexy foot of sleek gadgets, but I hope somehow it will be different this time, for our children’s sake.