Lawrence Downes reports on Apple’s virtual bookstore, with its animated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, designed to keep child readers from getting “sleepy and stupid.”  He raises some interesting questions about the migration of classic children’s stories into digital media.  These days, children have almost as much, if not more, exposure to media as adults.  He cites a study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on children’s media:

It was hard to give conclusive answers about children’s digital media, except that it’s vast. The report, a compilation of seven studies, found children swimming in a media ocean. Each day, it said, schoolchildren “pack almost 8 hours of media exposure into 5.5 hours of time” because they multitask with video games, music players and TV.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/opinio…

On a recent flight to Los Angeles, I witnessed a very unhappy three-year-old girl tortured by an e-book.  Her mother, desperate to keep her quiet, kept thrusting the animated device on her lap, with the hope that the kinetic energy of the book would distract her.  Sometimes less is more.  When it comes to picture books, and to Alice in Wonderland for that matter, the static page has real power to engage and to draw us into Elsewhere.  Still, I’m willing to try out Apple’s Alice in Wonderland, and I’m just hoping it’s not cluttered with merchandising platforms.  If it is, I’ll stick to Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in Wonderland.

Here’s Apple’s irresistible sales pitch:

 http://www.apple.com/ipad/built-in-apps/…

The postscript below was written after I had bought the ipad version of Alice in Wonderland.

P.S.  File this under one more huge advantage of the printed book: You can preview it at a bookstore, and, if it’s just a gimmick, you won’t buy it.  And you can return it.  This is not the case with  Alice in Wonderland for the ipad, which manages, despite its colors and animations, to be nothing more than a shadowy, anemic version of Lewis Carroll’s book.  Yes, it is true, when pictures dance, reading changes–not in a way that improves on the words in the story.  At least not so far.