JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

With the improvement of ICT, the e-book offers a new opportunity to help improve the children’s reading. There are arguments about choosing e-books or printed books for children, but the e-book provides some new features that printed do not have, thus to find out what is the good factors of the e-books will help the development of the e-books. I have discussed the relationship between children and reading, and furthermore, what is a good design of e-book is discussed, this aims to find the ways to design e-books that will encourage children to read and help improve the engagement between children and e-books. For finding the good factors of the e-book design, interviews with children and their parents were made. Each family is treated as an individual case. I have found out what are the most common opinions in these 11 families and what are differences between the preferences of parents (including grandparents) and children. The different tastes from younger children to the older children is also included in the findings. Due to the amount of the interviewed in the study, including all the data in a single case seems to get a lot of mass, thus the cross-case synthesis helps to get a clear result. This study reveals that not all the children have accessed to e-books, and the preferred feature between parents and children are not all different. The preferred interfaces of e-books from parents to children are quite the same, most of the interviewee choose the interface which is colourful, cartoon and with animations. However, one of the mothers also mentioned that animation is an argued feature that may limit the children’s imagination. What’s more, all of the parents mentioned that the screen of the e-books need to be improved, but this is also considered that the informing to the parents of the screen is needed. Moreover, both parents and children are interested in the read-aloud feature of the e-books, apart from this, parents are more focusing on the interactive features, animations while children prefer gamifications.