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By Joanna

Related: Chris Meadows’ May 29 installment in his series evaluating the Sony PRS-700. – D.R.

imageI supervise an informal after-school program a few times a week, and had my Sony Reader PRS-505 out while the kids were at play.

My gadgets are a familiar sight to them—I use a netbook and iPod, among other things, in some of my actual teaching lessons—and the older children are fond of playing trivia games with me on the iPod from time to time. The other day, they were busy with their lego building and I thought I could finish off The Hound of the Baskervilles at last on my Sony Reader. I should know better than to try and use my own toys around inquisitive kids!

Their initial reactions to the Reader were quite favorable. I had a pretty cloth cover on mine, and it made the girls in the group especially interested. Kids this age do not have any preconceptions about gender and technology, thank goodness, and they’ll grow up knowing how to do these things. The girls were quite comfortable with the idea of a book reader once they figured it out, and the advantages of such a device (for example, being able to carry around more than one book) were readily apparent to them with no prompting from me. I got lots of wows and oohs over my pretty toy!

imageFrom a software standpoint, they were able with help to sort out the file system and use the categories to find the handful of kiddie titles I had on there. And they had no trouble at all figuring out the buttons and using them to choose a book and advance the screens as they explored. I think some of them were more interested in pressing the buttons than in doing actual reading, but of course depending on the age and reading level of the child, your mileage will vary on that one. One precocious little reader was interested in doing some actual work with me, so as the others wandered back to their toys, I got her started on some actual reading.

First pick: Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses

My first pick was Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. I have a beautiful free version from MobileRead, complete with illustrations, and it hit the spot for reading like this. Each poem was short, geared to children and could fit on one screen. So there was a nice sense of accomplishment when we got to the end of the page because we’d actually finished doing something! I can see a child getting a bit lost on a longer work if they don’t have the tactile feedback of physical pages to work with. If we ever get to the point where we have readers specifically designed for children, a more obvious page indicator—either tactile, or more prominent graphically—would definitely be a feature worth considering.

I switched us over to a Project Gutenberg version of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book when she wanted an actual story. No pictures here, and it showed in her attention span, which waned shortly thereafter. I bought a few more minutes by showing her how to make the font bigger, but that was the end of the five-year-old and the Sony for now.

A few kid-related issues with the Sony

There are a few issues I would take away from this if I were buying a reader specifically to use with kids:

1) It’s not too hard for them to use. These kids had no trouble at all picking up the basics fairly easily. Of course, children this young would need an adult to obtain the content and load it onto the device for them, but the actual day to day operation was simple enough for even five year olds, and they would certainly be able to use the reader independently. This is a huge discovery for me because I have found that at times with kids this age, any benefit you might have from using technology with them can be lessened by an increased need to supervise. How many times has a really great computer lesson been ruined by a kid whose feet dangle at just the height of the tower’s power button? No matter how great the software or the website or the lesson, your constant vigilance on their feet so they don’t kick the darned thing off can put a real damper on things. A useful device they can actually use on their own may well be a worthwhile investment, even for  kids this young!

2) As with many audiences, a lot will depend on what suitable content is available, either through freebie channels or other sources. There are little kid books at Project Gutenberg, such as Lang’s fairy books, but as these are in the public domain, some feature antiquated language which might not appeal to today’s very young children (although of course, they could grow into them as one might with any classic!) As for the commercial stores, I’ve seen young adult stuff at Fictionwise, but I am not sure how much there is for smaller kids, or what the quality of any ancillary items like pictures might be. I saw how quickly my young audience lost interest when I switched to a book with no pictures. If you can’t get enough suitable texts for a younger child, it might not be worth it to invest in a reader for them until they are past the picture phase.

3) You may need to look more carefully at extra features. A bare bones reader might be less expensive—and less painful to you should they break it—then a fancier one. But if you don’t have support for larger fonts, pictures, layout control, and some ability to customize—for example, the ability to add a more obvious visual cue to measure progress in absence of physical pages—you might find the reader not as useful for a younger child.

4) A stylus-based reader might be a better fit for younger children. This particular child is quite advanced for 5, but even she kept reaching out her finger to point at the words as she read. If I were letting a child use the Sony for any length of time, I would steal a stylus from my old Palm device so they can point at the words without smudging up my screen with their fingers. But I would worry about letting them play with a touchscreen-based reader where they might keep turning pages—or exiting the book altogether—every time they touch a word while trying to read it.

My little reader enjoyed her experience with the Sony Reader. I asked her what she liked best about it, and she said ‘so many books!’ And she also complimented the pictures. I asked her to give the Reader a score between 1 and 10, with 1 being the lowest score and 10 being the highest. She said ’100!’ I also asked her what name she would like to be called when I sent the story to my friend with the magazine. ‘Princess Jasmine!’

So there you have it, straight from the mouth of the princess herself. The Sony Reader is a hit!

 
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