The process of reading transmitted light vs. reflective light is processed in different regions of the visual cortex. The regions of the brain devoted to the hand are many and varied. Reading accesses both the visual ability and the kinesthetic/hand abilities/regions of the brain. The pixelated microsecond flashes on a electronic device, or a computer, do not engage the many regions of the brain devoted to hand/speech as print in a hand-held book.
The combination of data overload available today in a form that promotes reduction of long-term memory does not bode well for future decision-making and serious cognitive pursuits.
Marshall Mcluhan of McGill intuitively posited "hot and cold" media in Understanding Media back in the 80's. And Jane Healy in 1980, wrote about the effects of TV on children in her book, Endangered Minds. I'm far from a Luddite on tech developments. But the neuroscience research is becoming stronger everyday on the lessening abilities of learning and memory with our new reading devices. Book rhymes with Nook but that's the end of the similarity.
Working as a board member for an organisation that has made the transition from paper-based board papers (anything up to 300 pages) to electronic promulgation, I find that I can read and absorb the information much faster from hard copy than I can from electronic media. Electronic media forces you into serial absorption of information whereas hard-copy enables much faster access to information, especially where one needs to backtrack through pages. As a consequence I insist on hard-copy promulgation of such information although I use the electronic data as backup.
It has been my experience in meetings that participants dealing with such material in electronic media can sometimes get lost, and not be at be able to quickly access information. However I've read many books online on both a Kindle reader and i Pad and have no problem with reading such material as it is specifically designed to be read sequentially.
I just read this entire article on-line and I can't remember any of it.
I have noticed the problems of serendipity when reading from certain types of computerized documents, as well as the lack of spatial orientation. A book naturally gives one a sense of overall position within the work, because the reader can see the thickness of pages before and after the current page.
While this can be a problem for certain types of reading, the sense of both serendipity and orientation can be restored by the use of a book-length scrollbar. A simple line with tick marks indicating chapters, along with some indication of current position, possibly in the form of a colored dot, can provide the same kind of spatial cue as thicknesses of stacked paper. Clicking on the scrollbar can let the reader jump across the work with the same kind of abandon as is found by leafing through pages, and other symbology can be used to indicate bookmarks or dog-eared corners.
Developers of e-Book readers should take care to study the habits of their customers, and provide such substitutes to the paper-only experience.
Having tried a couple of e-readers, I'm left wanting more. I found the small, 2D screen the biggest constraint.
Using an ereader I learned that for most text I don't read in a linear way, as the it is presented. I often go back in a book to refresh my memory. The article's description of navigating a terrain is an excellent metaphor for how I work. Further when studying I have often had several books open on the desk with bits of paper stuffed between the pages and sticky notes attached with words, arrows and diagrams. An ereader does not allow me to integrate the ebook’s text into my mental map and, for me, lowers the rate at which I absorb information.
Now if someone could develop an easy-on-the-eye, touch-screen colour display, about 2m by 1m, that I could fold-up and tuck into a shoulder bag and carry about, and the information stored could be hyperlinked to the web and I could annotate the text in anyway I wanted, and share my thoughts with others, and dumb DRM wasn’t included so I could trust that I could get at this information whenever I needed it even 20 years after the original publisher went bust ... I’d probably be the first in the queue!
They teach you this stuff in Human Computer Interaction class. Main points being:
a) Reading off a screen is harder than reading from hard copy.
b) People scan text on a screen instead of reading it in depth like they do with paper. I suppose you could liken it to speed reading.
c) As a result you have to tailor your content for presentation on a screen. Write small paragraphs and use headings and bullet points.
There is a wealth of information online now and if you make the effort to read stuff off a computer screen you can learn a lot.
Being able to look up words and references immediately enhances knowledge and a fuller understanding than when you read something on paper and then looked it up later when you were around a dictionary or encyclopedia. (If you remembered to do it.)
The studies cited in this article are just chronicling the transition from paper to electronic media; they are not reporting "true" distinctions that will still be true in fifty years, or even ten or twenty years. They are finding the awkward places that will be smoothed out by advancing technology and the constant cycling of human generations.
I remember when offset printing replaced impact printing, and how the change in the look of characters on the page made many readers unhappy, and convinced some academics that the reading experience had been degraded by the change.
I'm comfortable with reading on a good monitor or on an ebook, although I'm in a demographic that supposedly prefers paper. But a lot of paper books have unpleasant fonts. And a lot of books are printed in awkward sizes, on badly chosen paper. Only a small subset of printed books are actually a pleasure to read.
For most reading, give me a device which lets me pick a font and font size which is easy to read, and which keeps my place when I'm interrupted, and I'm happy.
I have no problem with ebooks, particularly using the Kindle software on my tablet. Magazine articles like this one, however, with the intrusive Like/Tweet/Share/etc. junk to the left and other linkages to right of the text, are very difficult for me to handle. Also, the fixed width of the text column is annoying. I would like to widen the frame and have the text fill the available width, but it won't. I love having embedded hypertext links to related material, but I don't want to follow those links while I'm reading or I will lose the "thread" as it were. I usually go back after completely reading and follow the links.
I was surprised to see no reference to the research reported by Jakob Nielsen, the expert on website usability. Empirical studies he cites, performed by himself and others, show that reading on a screen is more tiring and is remembered more poorly than reading on paper. See http://www.nngroup.com/reports/
I believe these studies focused on adults; it would be interesting to perform similar age-appropriate measurements for children.