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Confused about the pros and cons of reading your books in screen format? Here is an interesting study we might consider. In the
meantime, I'm hanging in to my paper versions.
The Justice Department's anti-trust lawsuit against Apple Inc. and
major publishers last week shows that influential companies
believe we're well on the way to a future of e-reading. It's
concerning, then, that some studies have shown that e-books might
harm memory. According to Maia Szalavitz in Time magazine,
studies have shown that people are less able to recall
information they read in e-books or on computer screens compared
with traditional text on a printed page (or the "dead-tree
format," as print's detractors call it). The problem seems to be
with lack of context. Reading is abstract, and physical context
such as spatial location is important. A formula in a textbook is
on the left or right page, or at the edge of the margin, or on
the top or bottom of a page. It occurs on a page, say, two-thirds
of the way through the book, which can be known subconsciously as
one flips through the pages.
Computer screens and e-books, by
contrast, give the reader much fewer spatial triggers to recall
information. For those of you who regularly print out your copy
of the Daily Advantage; place it in an acid-free cellophane wrap;
and secure it in your embossed, gold-lilted Daily Advantage binder,
you should have no problems.
The smaller the screen, the harder it is to remember stuff--a
fairly distressing result given how much of our information is
beginning to come from squinting at smartphones. Szalavitz points
to a study by Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group that
showed that, as the size of screens shrank, so did readers'
ability to recall information (I imagine corporate IT managers
who read this study are now confiscating
Blackberrys and
scrambling to outfit their employees with 55-inch, 1080p computer
screens so they'll never forget anything). Reading on a mobile
phone led to the worst reading information recall because there's
almost no room for any physical cues on the page. The only
physical context comes from someone walking into a wall while
they're too busy texting. I'm sure other studies have shown that
walking into walls is bad for reading comprehension.
A generation raised on digital media will probably have a much
easier time comprehending and remembering it and will perhaps
learn to substitute different contextual cues for the physical
ones relied on when reading books in print. During the transition
from papyrus scrolls to bound books, readers probably had similar
reactions. "Those kids today with their newfangled pages. Back in
my day, the truth unfurled in an unbroken continuity. Who can
remember anything when you're interrupted by all this page-
turning nonsense?"
Jeremy Ryan, Social Media Managing Editor
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