Ebooks children would want to read and engage with

• Authors: Monica Landoni
• Venue: BooksOnline '10 Proceedings of the third workshop on Research advances in large digital book repositories and complementary media
• Year: 2010

This paper describes an effort to build a bookshelf of electronic books for children. This will then be made available for researchers to run user studies. Reading is a very personal experience and, when considering children 6-9 years old, even reading for pleasure is intertwined with learning and getting essential lifelong skills. As children in the Western world are increasingly interacting with technology from a very young age, it is often the case they are exposed and enjoy playing, browsing and searching the web, even before their reading and writing skills are fully developed. Besides, we have experienced in previous studies how extremely positive is children's attitude toward technology and this is worth exploiting when considering an essential and demanding skill such as reading. On this basis, we believe electronic books have lot of potential in engaging and getting children more enthusiastic about reading. Of course proper interfaces have to be designed to take into account young readers' specific needs. In order to involve children in the design process we need a collection of titles that children would want to read. Copyright free material has a role to play with classics that can be presented in appealing editions to children but it is also important to offer content children really want to read. We also need to consider the social side of reading at that young age and how children rely on each other suggestions. This is why we believe the bookshelf we aim to build in consultation with al relevant stake-holders: librarians, book sellers, parents, children and educators, will play a crucial role in getting us a real picture of how children interact and enjoy reading electronic books. In this paper, we will describe a cluster of interrelated projects, all aimed at offering children innovative and engaging e-books. None of these projects has started yet, but in here we will explore their mutual implications and related expectations. Building a bookshelf of children titles will provide us with a collections to be used during the co-design and testing of innovative interfaces for e-books as in project HEBE. It will ensure children taking part in the design process would engage with books they are willing to read for real. This will, in turn, enable us to study and build a social network for children to share and search book reviews made by their peers.