Research evaluating the benefits of digital books for children’s early literacy has also yielded mixed results. Similarly, another study of 3- to 5-year-old Canadian children’s recall of stories presented in digital and print formats found no differences between the two formats (Richter & Courage, 2017). However, in a study of 4-year-old US children who read digital and paper books, children’s reading comprehension scores were almost equal for both formats (Lauricella, Barr, & Calvert, 2014). In another experiment, in which researchers compared the interactions of 3- to 4-year old Dutch children with digital and print books, children’s receptive vocabulary scores were higher when they read the digital book (Gremmen, Molenaar, & Teepe, 2016). For example, in a Canadian study of 17- to 26-month olds that compared electronic books and print books, children learned more new words and displayed more engaged and socially desirable behavior when reading the digital books (Strouse & Ganea, 2017a). Children’s Learning Outcomes With Digital Versus Paper BooksĪ substantial body of research has focused on comparing digital books to print books, with evidence of both positive and negative effects for children’s emergent literacy skills. I conclude with recommendations for a joint research and design agenda. The interaction among these variables, together with inconclusive evidence based on small negative correlations between digital books and children’s outcomes, raises questions about the conclusion reached by some pediatricians-that the promise of digital books improving children’s learning has not been fulfilled and their use should be discouraged in favor of print books (Tomopoulos, Klass, & Mendelsohn, 2019). Then, I discuss research on three components that might mediate these outcomes: parents’ reading strategies, children’s characteristics, and books’ characteristics. In this review, I include studies of children reading digital books with adults, with other children, and by themselves.įirst, I consider key findings from studies that compared digital and print books in relation to children’s early literacy outcomes. The term digital books refers to e-books, story apps, picture book apps, and iBooks, which offer fictional narratives in texts, illustrations, sounds, and interactive features, and which are available via touchscreen technologies. The focus in this article is on children from birth to age 5 years, when most children are not yet readers, which is the popular under-5 category targeted by commercial e-book providers (e.g., Apple). The field needs more practice-focused scholarship that considers nuanced sociocultural influences, which dovetail with the design features of individual e-books. Such an approach neglects several important process variables, such as parents’ and children’s behaviors with different features of books, which jointly affect children’s learning. Some have argued that comparisons of children’s outcomes in relation to digital versus print books isolate elements of context and design. In this article, I focus on children’s digital books in relation to the interaction among parents’ reading strategies, children’s characteristics, and books’ features, and explain the mixed findings in the literature on reading print versus digital books. Research on the use of children’s digital books has grown over the past two decades into a multidisciplinary and methodologically diverse area, with a focus on qualitative or quantitative research techniques and books produced commercially or by researchers. But if we view the context of parent–child reading as something that is created together socially and materially, then different digital books are suitable for different children and parents. If we assume that digital books unidirectionally alter the nature of parent–child interaction, then shared reading of digital books is inferior to shared reading of print books. The findings of studies on the topic have been mixed, with researchers following different theoretical and methodological approaches and reaching different conclusions, as highlighted in two recent literature reviews (Kucirkova, 2019 Reich, Yau, & Warschauer, 2016). This phenomenon, coupled with the undisputable benefits of children reading print books, makes it imperative to identify the benefits and limits of children’s digital books. From a very young age, children are increasingly using digital media.