Will ‘Digital Natives’ become e-book readers? : some useful methodological elements to understand the consumer’s perception of digital illustrated books for children

Today, European families are well equipped with tablet devices, and manufacturers are looking to the children's market segment to develop new opportunities. Indeed, this new portable and groundbreaking touchscreen, encourages new practices, both at school and for leisure. Its apparent simplicity of use, universally described as "intuitive" or "natural" for ‘Digital Natives', has attracted the interest of the majority of institutions (school, family, government) and has impacted on the cultural consumption of children. Unlike electronic reading devices whose technology does not reproduce colour or offer any activity other than reading, tablets offer illustrated books for children and the opportunity to dematerialize. However, representing only 0.6% of book sales in France, this market is only just emerging. Publishers are trying to understand the motivations for, and reasons against using e-books for under 10s in order to develop an attractive offer for lead users. Our paper is based on an exploratory research into consumers' perception of e-books for children as a part of their home entertainment practices. In addition to the results, we will discuss the research tool that we constructed because its design and implementation involved choices made and stances taken by the researcher. More precisely, before specifying the benefits and limitations of our methodology we propose to show how we came to develop a device that questions parents and children jointly. Keywords: E-book, perception, reader socialization, methodology, activity theory Topic: Digital media literacies and consumption