Are enhanced e-books bad for kids’ reading skills?

New research from the Sesame Workshop’s Joan Ganz Cooney Center suggests that enhanced e-books’ special features can be distracting both to young kids and to their parents reading the books with them.

The Cooney Center studied 32 child-parent pairs. The kids were all between 3 and 6 years old. Half the pairs read a print book and a regular e-book and the other half read a print book and an enhanced e-book (defined as an e-book with “enhanced multimedia experiences” like games and other interactive features, and the focus of reading apps like Scholastic’s Storia and Ruckus Reader). Kids who read enhanced e-books remembered “significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story.” And “both types of e-books, but especially the enhanced e-book, prompted more non-content related actions (e.g., behavior or device focused talk, pushing hands away) from children and parents than the print books.”