Research conducted by BookTrust, in association with the Open University, revealed that 76 percent of surveyed parents found their children prefer print books for reading for pleasure and 69 percent prefer print books for educational reading.
For interactive e-books, only 30 percent of parents said that their child prefers using them for reading for pleasure, and 34 percent for educational reading. Some 15 percent of parents said that children prefer using simple e-books for reading for pleasure and educational reading.
In the Good ereader article, literacy advocate and teacher Donna Rasmussen thinks children prefer print books because “we are tactile creatures” and that people do creative things with books that they can’t with e-books.
The Book Trust study found that reasons for preferring print books over e-books were that children enjoyed turning the book’s pages, owning their own book and choosing the books from the library.