Teacups, helmets and sunglasses, oh my! Search for the thing that is not quite like all the others, click on it, and you can make the eggs crack, the hedgehog crawl, or the jellyfish swim. Test out your finding skills and see if you can see… Is it a leaf or a lizard? Is it a snake or a string? Find the right one and get rewarded with a cute animation and a song. Whimsically rhyming clues will guide you along in an engaging I Spy ebook for the technology generation.
This type of book is a great illustration, I think, of the different emerging roles of ebooks and paper books for kids. In my opinion, there is just nothing to compare with the bonding that happens when a child cuddles up next to me on the sofa with a big book spread on my lap, turning pages and asking questions, engaged in a tactile, non-screen reading experience. However, ebooks can do amazing things and offer amazing interactive experiences at incredibly low cost that will fit into your purse and weigh about the same as your keys. “Find Me” is not a new idea. There are plenty of searching books available for kids of all ages. This one simply takes advantage of technology to give that extra element of interaction that children love so much. That little bit of song and animation that rewards the kid when they find the sock that was actually a giraffe makes the search so much more exciting. Just doing it by myself gave me a little thrill of satisfaction. I wasn’t 100 percent impressed with the rhyming verse, but I think the emphasis of this book was more on the whole experience than on the artistry of words, so it doesn’t bother me as much as it otherwise would. My kids love it, I think it’s a great new twist on a classic book idea, and it is free for a little while longer on iBooks. What more could you want?
