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Should parents control their kids e-reading? And if so, should the Kindle e-store and others include ‘child’ accounts?
December 2, 2009 | 7:58 am
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By David Rothman
Should parents restrict their children’s e-reading? And if so, should the Kindle e-bookstore and others include restricted “child” accounts, so Junior can’t read the same saucy best-seller that his father is?
Nonparents, not just people with kids, should care about these issues. If Kindle-type stores cannot filter their offerings for kids, then Washington eventually may step in with its controlling ways and start censoring. Impossible? Well, objectively, I see this as a real worry if, say, Sarah Palin-style politicians start gaining traction. Even Al Gore and his wife showed a censor-friendly side. Remember Tipper’s crusade against evil music?
Children’s reading is among the topics covered in the Wall Street Journal’s overview of e-readers. Quote:
Dianna Broughton, a 45-year-old stay-at-home mom in Lancaster, S.C., bought a Kindle last year and says she now “reads more, and my kids read more.”
But Ms. Broughton says she can’t recommend the Kindle to people who aren’t technically savvy and might want to purchase their books anywhere other than the Amazon store. That’s because the Kindle doesn’t read copyright protected files from other bookstores or libraries. It also makes it tough for parents to monitor what their children are reading, if a child has a Kindle that is registered to his parent’s Amazon account.
“The parent’s entire e-book archive is accessible to that child’s Kindle–individual titles can’t be locked out,” says Ms. Broughton. “Parental controls are one of the most wished-for features.” There are technical work-arounds for some of these issues, but they require downloading unofficial software.
The rest of the WSJ piece: Useful info on eBabel
I did spot at least one inaccuracy in the WSJ piece. $219 has been the Amazon price of a refurbished Kindle 2, not a first-gen Kindle (detail: just now I couldn’t find a refurbed 2 promoted on a K2 page).
But The WSJ also passes on excellent advice from Bob LiVosi of BooksOnBoard, now the largest independent e-store—namely that a cash-strapped family should consider netbooks and other laptops rather than sinking the $300 into a dedicated reader. After all, a laptop can do much more than just read books.
To reporter Geoffrey Fowler’s credit, Fowler also mentions not just DRM but also e-book standards. “Sony has tried to differentiate itself in e-books by supporting an open industry standard called Epub and digital-rights-management software from Adobe. Barnes & Noble recently said it will do the same.” Amazon is holding out. Come, Jeff Bezos and Ian Freed.
Think of readers like Maria Blair, 61, a Baltimore woman who switched brands of readers and then couldn’t read her Kindle books. Works in reverse, too, of course. In effect, Amazon is denying her the right to own books for real, and the entire e-book industry is suffering since bad news gets around. I don’t think that Amazon is about to port its software over to the Sony Reader or the Nook in the near future.
Just as with the children’s reading issue, if e-bookdom can’t take care of the eBabel and DRM messes, then Washington in time may step in.
(Thanks to Gary Price of ResourceShelf for the WSJ spotting.)
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Comments:
What do you mean by “Sarah Palin” style politicians? Republicans in general or something in particular about her because I never heard her talk about ebooks or anything really on censorship?
Frankly I’m more worried more about the “Nancy Pelosi” style politicians who want to spread their “fairness doctrine” beliefs to every facet of American society.
Non-mandatory parental controls and “kid’s accounts” both make sense to me: A “kid’s account” would probably be controlled and restricted by the seller; and parental controls let the parents do that job. And those parents that don’t believe in controls for their children can do nothing.
It’s those who wish being “parents” to all, whatever persusion they may be, rather than parents to their own that I’m worried about. And how about an e-book company that arbitarily removes titles already purchased without notifying the customer? Controlling access to information is censorship and parents can and should play this role. Open access to information is a fundamental right in our society, but not necessarily in our homes.
That’s why you give parents a tool of their own… and an easy-to-use service provided by the seller… let the parents pick. With just those 2 tools, governments can stay out of it.
@Steve – agreed. I don’t want Nancy Pelosi OR Sarah Palin raising my daughter. Tools to monitor what she can access are fine, but I have to be able to turn them off if I want to.
I’m not a parent, but if I were, I’d never ban access to books; if the child can actually read the book, then no restorations should be placed on accessibility. If a twelve year old wants to read porn or Bible, let him, he would only find some other way to pick up the naughty books.
However, I would probably remove the credit card for payment option and replace it with a gift card so spending can can limited. Control the spending, not the books the kid can read.
@Greg: So, you’re okay if they spend their entire book budget on porn? You go, Dad!
Well, as a parent, you bet I am planning on monitoring my child(ren)’s internet and reading habits when they get old enough. I may not need to stop them from reading any books, but I do want to make sure that if they are reading books that cover issues that would be difficult for them, that I have discussions with them about the book. If a 12 year old stumbles on Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto, I want them to understand those books in their proper historical context.
I think I would also stop my child from looking at porn; sexually explicit material might be ok, but I don’t want my child to believe that the relationships between men and women are built just around sex.
Ultimately, I agree some tools to allow parents to monitor should be sufficient.
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Bill
I am sorry — but are you crazy! Control the literature that children read — for what reason? Is maintaining ignorance now a virtue?
My passion for knowledge and reading was born in free wandering through, first, the local library and then, later (around 14), the State library.
For God’s sake suffer the children to come onto literature of all kinds, not look for ways to mislead them away from it.
Before I was 16 I had read the Communist Manifesto (a fine work of political literature), Mien Kamph (really very silly), Sir Richard Burton’s Karma Sutra and the Perfumed Garden, a little Freud, a lot of history and any hetro pornography I could get my hands on (none in the libraries alas).
I have never censored anything my sons read or watch, but I take a keen interest in whatever they are interested in and discuss it fully and have since they were little.
Parents who foster ignorance do not truly care for their young, as much as they pretend to — if they truly cared they would care for their children’s minds which obviously takes second place to more parochial concerns. Stupidity has never been a virtue.
Bill, sex is just fine, if you want your children to understand the relationships between men and women in a rounded way, just love and respect your wife — but nothing on earth, aside from hormone deficiency, is going to stop adolescent boys thinking almost exclusively about sex in its most physical and acrobatic forms.
And if you feel I am trying to belittle and marginalize quaint parenting ideologies — I am.
Basically puritans are not wanted near bookstores or libraries — stay away and be quiet, close the curtains, switch-off the lights and sit in the dark, but don’t do the same thing to your children, at least don’t expect any sensible person help you in such a task.
I am sorry — but are you crazy! Control the literature that children read — for what reason? Is maintaining ignorance now a virtue?
My passion for knowledge and reading was born in free wandering through, first, the local library and then, later (around 14), the State library.
For God’s sake suffer the children to come onto literature of all kinds, not look for ways to mislead them away from it.
Before I was 16 I had read the Communist Manifesto (a fine work of political literature), Mien Kamph (really very silly), Sir Richard Burton’s Karma Sutra and the Perfumed Garden, a little Freud, a lot of history and any hetro pornography I could get my hands on (none in the libraries alas).
I have never censored anything my sons read or watch, but I take a keen interest in whatever they are interested in and discuss it fully and have since they were little.
Parents who foster ignorance do not truly care for their young, as much as they pretend to — if they truly cared they would care for their children’s minds which obviously takes second place to more parochial concerns. Stupidity has never been a virtue.
Bill, sex is just fine, if you want your children to understand the relationships between men and women in a rounded way, just love and respect your wife — but nothing on earth, aside from hormone deficiency, is going to stop adolescent boys thinking almost exclusively about sex in its most physical and acrobatic forms.
And if you feel I am trying to belittle and marginalize quaint parenting ideologies — I am.
Basically puritans are not wanted near bookstores or libraries — stay away and be quiet, close the curtains, switch-off the lights and sit in the dark, but don’t do the same thing to your children, at least don’t expect any sensible person to help you in such a task.
sorry about the double post — my machine acted up.
When I was a teen I delighted in the discovery that many novels had sex scenes in them. Don’t take that away from the future generations! Reading about sex is far better than the kiddies actually doing it.
I, for one, back your post Greg S.! Well said.
I often wonder how many of the “no control over kid’s reading” advocates actually have kids.
When you actually have kids, and have raised them to adulthood, you learn about something called “age appropriate.” A responsible parent pays attention to the emotional, psychological & intellectual development of the child, and insures that they don’t get involved in things they don’t have the skill set to handle.
I would no more have let my younger kids roam free in the bookstore than I would let them decide what is going to be served for dinner.
I have raised 5 kids by letting them have complete freedom to read within the limits of their emotional, psychological and intellectual ability to handle what they get to read, with the objective of getting them to the point of having the liberty to read whatever they want when they have learned to know what they are doing. Same as with anything you teach a child – you start off carefully and gradually relax the restrictions to the point where the child has the ability to function autonomously.
I don’t want society making these kind of judgments for all parents and kids, whether in the direction of censorship or license. I do, however, want an environment in which the latter is not the defacto result of utopian ideas about how books can’t be dangerous.
And I’ll bet that both Palin & Pelosi would agree on this, having both raised kids.
So you bet parents should control what their kids read. And child accounts are useful tools. But if some particular parent wants to hand over the credit card to the kid and say “buy away,” that’s his decision and he should be allowed to make it.
Personally, I’ve found that “I’ll buy you whatever book you want so long as you will make an honest effort to read it” to be a pretty good policy. That let the kids have the books, but gave me the oversight to steer them to the books they could handle.
And oh, yeah, I know that kids can get books their parents object to. That’s life, but it doesn’t have to be policy.
Dear harmon,
I have 2; both boys, they are 16 & 15.
The issue at the retailer and device manufacturer is a no-brainer. Yes, they *should* offer kid-friendly accounts and yes, connected ereaders *should* have parental controls. Shoukd, however, doesn’t mean will or even can.
The perfect model for an effective patental controls system is Microsoft’s XBOX which has had parental controls since the original XBOX shipped and when they established LIVE, it too came with parental controls.
The way they work is that they give the parents that *choose* to use those tools the ability to restrict what online content (games and video) their kids’ accounts can see (I.e. if set to say, PG-13 for video, the online movie catalog filters out R-rated flicks) download or play. They also provide a timer system that allows parents to regulate the kids weekly gaming time through quotas.
Parents get to decide what level of material their kids are mature enough to handle; Microsoft simply gives them the tools to raise their kids the way *they* choose to.
Of course, for gaming consoles it’s easy because there is a body in place to rate games and the games themselves carry the appropriate flags so a Mature rated game won’t run on a user account restricted to Teen-or-younger games.
For parental controls on ebooks, the first stage would be to establish an impartial rating body capable of classifying books by their content.
And, of course, that is the hitch.
Who bells the cat?
Don’t expect Amazon or any alert retailer to willingly get into *that* culture war. WalMart, however, is braver. If they get into ebooks, I’d expect that to be their calling card…
BTW, to find refurb Kindles, just go to the Amazon warehouse section and do a search on Kindle. The K2 pops up right away at $219.
So your argument for private censorship is that the government may force companies to do it anyway? Implementing censorship out of fear of the government passing a law is almost the same thing as the government forcing companies to do it. I don’t think the government will be trying to censor e-readers any time soon but if that’s your fear I would say that’s all the more reason for companies to do everything they can to make sure their products CAN’T be censored.
As for the parents scared about what their kids are reading, I think that’s probably a legitimate parental concern. I’m one of those people who doesn’t have kids and while I don’t care too much about parents who try to steer kids away from certain content, it’s important to understand that censorship is harder to implement today than probably ever before. Kids will find stuff you don’t want them to see or read. Ebook piracy is only going to increase. As a guy who grew up in the dawning of the internet age (I was about 9 when we got our first internet connection), I know I purposely sought out and found access to all sorts of stuff my parents never would have acquiesced to me having. Your kids will do the same. I just hope parents recognize this and talk to their kids about that kind of content rather than ignore reality.
My opinion on the matter….hows about a no. Children can handle a lot more nowadays than the previous generation of the same age, I am only eleven and my extensive reading would put most average adults to shame, for a fact you cannot put a “children’s account” for a few reasons, firstly, sex sells. Simple as that, an increasing number of books (i.e House of night series) are including sex as an integral part of their content. Second reason, the more you stop your child from reading “age inappropriate” material, the more enticing the forbidden fruit. Even in children books meant for the below 12yrs group is starting to incorporate little bits of romance in its plot, slowly increasing.Even my own mom is fine with me learning about sex, of course, not through porn, porn is just not natural, making love is a different matter, one has to differentiate between the blurry thin lines of sexual reading material and material that happens to include sex.
If you’ve bothered reading this far, I have one thing to say…..thanks for reading!
P.S this is just my opinions
P.S.S BTW, if you still confused, email me at hedssweetlemon@yahoo.com.sg