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The Future of Reading Stories

My friends and I like to debate the future of books and reading.  (For us, this has more appeal than politics or football.)  There are the pro-e-readers in the group who are looking to carry half of their libraries in their smart phones and there are the anti e-readers who are happiest with the traditional paper pages in their hand.   I enjoy the debates but until recently I believed the only difference between traditional and electronic books was the carrying case.  After all, they were both just printed words on a flat surface, right?  Nope.  When it comes to ebooks, words may be just the beginning. My favorite ereader has a nifty gadget: an incorporated dictionary that lets me highlight any word in the text I don’t know so the definition will pop up without me having to close the page.    There’s an encyclopedia link there too.  Very helpful.  Now I’ve learned that someone has developed ebooks for little kids that have animated pictures mixed in with the text and links in the text (like my dictionary) that helps youngsters understand new words.  Kids with the interactive and animated illustration books gained more in story understanding and vocabulary…