ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the availability and accessibility of digital books for children aged 0-8 years with narration as a main source of information. Given that parents still prefer paper to digital for book-sharing with their child, parents may be more inclined to download games or films instead of book-like narrative apps for their children to use when interacting with new media. To get more of a sense of the number of digital books, their quality and the supply of these books per language, the chapter describes the available digital books for young children in five relatively small languages. These languages are: Catalan, Dutch, Hebrew, Maltese and Norwegian. The app market is dominated by commercial companies operating internationally, the result being that only a few apps are available in the mother tongue with localized content. Most digital books are based on existing paper books that meet standards concerning the quality of the narration and the illustrations.