Children's interactions with iPad books: research chapters still to be written

Children’s interactive e-books are novel literacy tools with interactive and multimodal representations of story contents and increased customizable features. The learning opportunities represented by these new affordances demand a thorough consideration of children’s engagement, including the contextual and socio-cultural factors which influence the books’ deployment in home and classroom settings. Currently, there is inconclusive evidence about how the affordances of interactive e-books support children’s learning, with studies mostly limited to comparison studies with nondigital books and observational studies of children’s immediate engagement. In both lines of research, the content of the stories, the overall context of interaction and the background of the interactants are neglected. This article makes recommendations for future research and highlights the value of iPads as a new medium enriching children’s experiences but also challenging traditional research assumptions.