Is it a book?

A thoughtful article in today's New York Times takes on one of the questions that has bothered librarians for twenty years or more. "Click and Jane" describes some of the websites that present stories for children, stories either previously published as books or patterned on books. Are these books? Is a child learning to love books and reading when she experiences stories online? As I read the article--online--I wondered whether that's the question we ought to be asking. Is translating a book, unchanged, to the screen even desirable? That's the way Weston Woods started presenting picture books to children back in the heady days of the 1960s. Some librarians can still remember the projected filmstrips which made picture books visible to a large group of children at the same time. Gradually those filmstrips became animated and turned into films and videos, less a replication of the book than an amplification of it. The old filmstrips have disappeared but some websites are still experimenting with different ways of introducing stories to children. Perhaps we need many different ways to present stories to children, especially pre-literate children. Certainly cuddling with a parent while being read a story is an experience every child should have, but need it be the only way to share books with children? Perhaps we should turn our attention to the magical combination of pictures, words and narrative that make up the great picture books and encourage children to experience them in as many formats as possible. One thing we know for sure is that we can't turn back the clock to a world where print offers children the only access to stories. Librarians have dedicated themselves to offering children wider horizons and richer experiences. Let's welcome the best of the new, while never forgetting the value in the old versions. Children will embrace them all if we give them a chance.