Is iPad the New See n’ Say? Posted on September 01, 2011 Post a comment

Recently, I was on a plane sitting next to a woman who was playing Angry Birds on her iPad. I was, too, so we made fast friends. She confessed that the iPad actually belonged to her three-year-old son who used it to play learning games—she was only borrowing it.

Just two days later, my hair stylist shared that he was planning to give his 2-year-old son an iPad for his birthday. He was blown away by how his son could easily navigate the iPad’s intuitive navigation himself, and he and his wife were excited about the many learning apps and websites available to their child through the iPad.
That left me wondering: is there a trend here? Is iPad becoming the new See n’ Say?

Electronic learning toys are nothing new. For decades there have been many lo-fi products that kids loved, but the digital age has taken things to a new level. Whereas it used to be interesting enough to pull a string and hear the cow go “moooo,” today kids can hear the cow sound, get rewards for recognizing it, and even explore more information on the bovine species—all without cracking a book.

So what will the world be like when these tablet-toting toddlers hit their twenties and thirties? By that time they will have spent their formative years learning, reading, watching, and being entertained in ways their parents never could have imagined, even a few short years ago. That will have tremendous impacts on consumption of digital media.

In August, we blogged about eBook market stats and posted a non-scientific poll about eBook adoption on our Facebook Page. Our goal was to gauge people’s feelings about the rise of digital ink, and we were surprised to learn that the majority of our Facebook friends who answered our poll were interested, or at least open-minded, about eBooks. Add in a generation exposed to mobile information at a very young age, and all signs point to major changes in the delivery of the written word, probably faster than we all expected.

Physical books will not go away any time soon. But the shift from print to digital is not only here, but it is happening and will continue to happen in a very real way.