Open a NOOK Kids book as you do any other book—tap its cover. The book opens to landscape mode, so turn the NOOK to match its orientation. On the right-hand side of the screen you see the book cover, and on the left you find square buttons, letting you choose in which mode to open the book—Read by Myself, Read and Play, Read to Me, and Read and Record. The exact buttons that appear depend upon the capabilities built into the book.
If you and your child (or your child alone) want to read the book without narration, tap the Read by Myself button. That opens the book without using the audio track or narration, although the activities are still available—tap the white star when it appears at the top of the screen.
Go forward or back in the book as you would normally in a book: Swipe to the left or right to move forward or back a page, or tap the right (forward) or left (back) side of the screen.
If the text in a book is too small to read, double-tap it and you zoom in. Double-tap again or tap anywhere on the page to zoom out. If the book has an audio track, when you enlarge the text, you see a Play button in the shape of an orange triangle in the top-left corner. Tap that button to play the audio—and, yes, you can play it even if you’ve opened the book in Read by Myself mode. If there are any animations associated with the audio, they’ll play as well.
Note
When you turn the page after you’ve enlarged text, you see normal-size text on the next page, not the enlarged size. And if you’ve played audio on the page, the next page won’t automatically play audio.
You can also zoom in on pictures by pinching out, as you normally do on the NOOK. When you’re zoomed in you can also move the page around to get a better look at the picture you’ve zoomed in on, for example, moving it toward the center of the screen. Double-tap anywhere on the screen to zoom out and to return the page to its normal position.
Note
You can also enlarge text by pinching out, but when you enlarge text in this way, you don’t get to play the audio track. You can play the audio track only if you double-tap the text to enlarge it. Strange but true.
When you come across a page with a star on it, that means you can play an activity, which can be just about anything—changing the colors on the page, drawing on the page, and more. Tap the star to run the activity. Arrows appear at either side of the page, the star turns into a square, and a narrator tells you about the activity and how you can play it—for example, tapping anywhere on a page to add mutant alien slime (thankfully it’s onscreen only; no cleanup required).
To move to the next or previous page, tap either arrow. That’s right, when you’re playing, you tap arrows, rather than the screen margins. That’s because, when you do an activity, the screen becomes active, so touching it spurs an action of some kind, like adding color instead of turning pages. If you want to stay on the same page but would like the activity to end, tap the square, and you go back to normal reading mode.
If you’d prefer to have the book read aloud to your child, tap the Read to Me or Read and Play button when you open the book. (Not all books have activities; if you open one that doesn’t, there’s no Read and Play button.)
At this point, nothing could be simpler: The book opens, and a narrator starts reading. The narration plays only for that page, and stops when the full page is read. To go on to the next page or back to the previous page, use your favorite page-turning gesture. When you get to the new page, the narration starts. If you want to go to the next or previous page in the middle of a page being read, just turn the page; the narration stops, and then begins reading the page to which you’ve turned.
Everything in the books works just like Read by Myself mode—you can zoom in and out of text and graphics, do activities when you see a star, and so on. When you do activities, the narration stops, but it continues if you zoom in and out of graphics and text.
When you’re reading a NOOK Kids book, the Reading Tools menu doesn’t work as it does in typical NOOK books. Tapping the center of the page does nothing. But if you tap the small up arrow at the bottom of the screen, you see a navigation toolbar with thumbnails of every page in the book. Swipe through the thumbnails, tap the page you want to read (or have read to you), and there you go. If you decide you don’t want to go to another page, tap the down arrow or anywhere on the page to make the thumbnail navigation disappear.
Note
The thumbnails don’t display the star that tells you whether pages have activities on them. So the only way to know whether there’s an activity on a page is to go to it.
You can also get to the Kids Books section of your Library from the navigation toolbar; simply tap the Library icon. When you head there, the screen orientation changes to vertical.