

Digital vs. Print: Reading Comprehension and the Future of the Book - jcr
http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/slissrj/vol4/iss2/6/

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smartial_arts
TLDR (from PDF):

As this article demonstrates, print books are still the best suited to the
optical, cognitive, and metacognitive requirements of the reading brain. While
e-paper technology has been shown to be the optical equivalent of print on
paper, e-readers still are lacking in the physicality that has been shown to
be so important for comprehension. E-readers also lack the haptic qualities
that readers enjoy about books, and seem only willing to give up only when
convenience and portability are at a premium. In terms of metacognition,
ereaders provide limited opportunities for text interaction, while virtual
page turning has been demonstrated to discourage review of previously read
material. Computer-read texts have all the limitations of e-readers without
the superior optics of e-paper, and the added cognitive disadvantage of
distractions from multitasking. Hyperlinks, once thought to streamline the
learning process, have instead proven to interrupt the seamlessness of the
reading process from perception to thought processing, and this is when they
are passed over. If links are actually followed, the lack of textual linearity
is sure to lead to confusion. When learning from a text is the objective of
reading, printed books will remain the preferred format.

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manicdee
I love the artificial constraints that researchers put on electronic texts in
order to make them look worse than paper.

"To provide experimental support for the idea that the physicality of a text
is important for comprehension, psychologist Anne Mangen (2013) [required]
half of the subjects [to] read from an unpaginated pdf file…"

Which is to say that the test was about pagination, not about the difference
between a PDF on a computer and the same document on paper.

In a test to determine if the back-lighting of LCD based readers would disrupt
sleep habits, subjects using the electronic reader have been forced to read
for an hour in a fixed position with the brightness turned all the way up. The
subjects reading from paper books were free to adjust their position however
they wished.

In other tests, the paper version of a document was properly typeset while the
electronic version was rendered in the ugliest font available, with
hyphenation turned off.

I have yet to see a paper vs electronic study without odds stacked against the
electronic reader.

"Noyes and Garland’s experiment (2005) might account for the experience of
long- time astronomy professor David Bruning, who believes that today’s
digital native students no longer have the patience necessary to truly engage
with and understand difficult reading material…"

I wonder if the perceived shift in generational attention spans is due to
over-abundance of entertainment material, a surplus of information, and
perhaps our favourite medium of TV essentially training us to have thirty
second attention spans?

But no, the report pins the blame on computers because they present
information on an electronic screen.

"As this article demonstrates, print books are still the best suited to the
optical, cognitive, and metacognitive requirements of the reading brain. While
e-paper technology has been shown to be the optical equivalent of print on
paper, e-readers still are lacking in the physicality that has been shown to
be so important for comprehension."

No, the article demonstrates nothing of the sort. The "lack of physicality"
was based on a study which endeavoured to remove _all traces_ of physicality
from the electronic document: there was no pagination in the electronic
document.

The article already addressed the issue that there are no components of the
brain uniquely involved in reading, so the "requirements of the reading brain"
is a furphy too!

The article can't even agree with its own sources about the difference between
written notes and typed notes:

"Given the demonstrated physicality of reading, it seems likely that typing on
a keyboard is, to the writing brain, the cognitive equivalent of reading
virtual text, and therefore a more indirect and inferior way of achieving
understanding."

versus

"Recent experiments by psychologists Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer
(2014) confirm that taking notes in cursive facilitates comprehension better
than typing notes on a keyboard, possibly because the greater speed of typing
leads to verbatim notes, while note taking in cursive tends to be a synthesis
of content in a reader’s own words."

Noting that in the experiment where paper and electronic readers were required
to study the texts for the same period of time, they got the same results,
while in the experiment where both groups of readers were given as much time
as they felt they needed, the electronic readers who were reading on computer
screens finished sooner and as a consequence got worse results. Somehow this
is a reflection on electronic books, rather than the difference in experience
between reading a book that you hold in your hands versus a computer screen
that remains in a fixed position, forcing the reader to sit at attention.

The issue of reader reluctance to flip backwards through pages on an
electronic reader speaks more to the design of the electronic reader's user
experience than some innate value of electronic books. More research needs to
be done there.

At best, this paper is a nice bibliography for further study by people
interested in correcting some of the poor experimental design.

\---

As far as anecdotes go: I am no longer comfortable reading from paper books.
They are bulky, ungainly, and require me to orient myself in relation to an
available light source. With a paper book, I can't simply turn the ambient
lighting up or down to a comfortable level and read where I want. Even worse,
with a paper book, regardless of what markings and annotations I use, I am
forced to remember where in the book the information is that I want. In an
electronic book, I only need to remember which book contains the information I
want. The electronic book reader will help me with the fine navigation.

I agree with the suggestion that handwritten notes encourage better learning
outcomes, for exactly the reason suggested in this article (the quote earlier
in my reply about hand written notes encouraging the student to rephrase the
concept in their own words). Again, I don't have any experimental evidence to
support my supposition, so I'll just cherry pick the study that supports my
opinion :)

~~~
jcr
If you pardon the pun, I'm torn on the pagination issue. The way reader
software and formats actually work has a good deal of historic baggage. For
example, long ago when system resources were limited, it made a lot of sense
to only do the calculations to render one "page" of data at a time. Even
though those limitations no longer exist, reader software (and file formats)
was still originally designed to leverage single page/screen loading. You can
see the artifacts of this history in most PDF readers as the "Continuous View"
or similar viewing options.

Similarly, a good deal of reader software and formats are designed for the
sake of printing out paper hard copies, so you'll still have some degree of
pagination displayed on-screen even when there is no intention of printing to
paper.

Another part of the pagination problem is simply skeuomorphism in the design
of reader software and related file formats. The "page" and "book" metaphor
was just too useful to ignore when creating electronic documents for the
general public which (originally) had no idea how computers really worked.

BTW, you might also enjoy this study:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8850340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8850340)

