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Do Readers Absorb Less On Kindles Than On Paper? Not Necessarily
An anonymous reader writes eBooks are great and wonderful, but as The Guardian reports, they might not be as good for readers as paper books. Results from a new study show that test subjects who read a story on a Kindle had trouble recalling the proper order of the plot events. Out of 50 test subjects, half read a 28-page story on the Kindle, while half read the same story on paper. The Kindle group scored about the same on comprehension as the control group, but when they were asked to put the plot points in the proper order, the Kindle group was about twice as likely to get it wrong.
So, is this bad news for ebooks? Have we reached the limits of their usefulness? Not necessarily. While there is evidence that enhanced ebooks don't enhance education, an older study from 2012 showed that students who study with an e-textbook on an ebook reader actually scored as well or higher on tests than a control group who did not. While that doesn't prove the newer research wrong, it does suggest that further study is required. What has your experience been with both recall and enjoyment when reading ebooks?
So, is this bad news for ebooks? Have we reached the limits of their usefulness? Not necessarily. While there is evidence that enhanced ebooks don't enhance education, an older study from 2012 showed that students who study with an e-textbook on an ebook reader actually scored as well or higher on tests than a control group who did not. While that doesn't prove the newer research wrong, it does suggest that further study is required. What has your experience been with both recall and enjoyment when reading ebooks?
I find a study like this to be highly suspect. It's a 28 page story, hardly anything special. Have them read an actual novel instead. In 28 pages the "plot" is going to either be very convoluted or extremely thin. I find it just as likely that the 28 page story bored the kindle folks half to death and they didn't bother trying to recall it.
You're going to have to do better than 28 pages. That's barely a chapter in the books I read.
I think there is something in this. I used to read paper books prolifically, but through change in lifestyle (kids, work pressures) didn't get round to it so much. The kindle has allowed me to read more again because I can take it everywhere with me. But I certainly get much more confused about which book was which and have less association with who the author was as the whole book purchase decision making is so much quicker.
This means I lose track of which books in a particular series I've read, and find myself wondering if I've read a particular title or not
BUT, I am reading more again and enjoying it when I do. So does it really matter?
E-readers are easier to hold in my hands, especially when it comes to long (in terms of pages) or small (in terms of physical size) books. I also like that I can read in the dark with my e-reader because it has a backlit screen.
It's easier to turn the page of normal books, though. It's also much easier to skip around between large numbers of pages.
What I've noticed in myself and in others is that it's not so much the act of reading as it is the act of putting into practice what one has read, from the simplest form in transcription, to the most complex in applied labs.
In myself, for something that's going to be difficult to remember from a lecture or a text, I find that writing it down with a pencil or pen makes remembering it easier than typing it does. My wife has commented similarly for herself as well. That's part of what makes me wonder about all of these electronic education means, in that I don't think they're as good at reinforcing learning as penmanship is. Rote repetition isn't necessarily fun, but it does often work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Did they keep all the other variables the same? page size, font and font size, page colour etc...?
The big one for me is the amount of the story on each page as this is something that I would expect to have an effect on the ability to remember things in order, rather than in bits.
The Kindle (unlike my first ereader - a Sony that sat unused after the first month) dramatically changed my reading habits. It made it very easy to read at night in bed (thanks to the small weight and the integrated light), to carry a bunch of books with me anywhere (e.g. commuting to work, on vacation etc) and also the instantaneous delivery helps getting a book the instant you think about reading it.
As a result I am enjoying reading more, but, yeah, I guess recall of individual books is a bit worse now that I am reading more than twice as many...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
It doesn't look quite like paper yet. A little more contrast perhaps and zero reflectivity, and no that doesn't mean embedded LEDs. What I find is that ebooks make a poorly written work a lot less appealing, while I have no difficulty reading, enjoying and retaining the masterpieces in that format.
We don't store memories in any particular order, chronologically, we kinda group them by importance. To "Remember" the order of a book, we often take other subtle clues like, how far into the book we were which our memories can get from the thickness of the pages as we were reading.
E-Readers don't provide that.
But this still doesn't matter to me one jot, like the famous headlines "Elderly vision improves when they turn the lights on" or "Dead man found in cemetery."
Also, which model of Kindle? There are a distressing number of options:
e -ink or LCD?
With advertisements or without?
Large or small sized?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
With a physical book that I've read I have a fairly good idea where I need to open it up to find something I'm looking for. With an eBook there are no pages to really catalog because they're all on the same page. Just a thought.
I'm a calculus instructor. We're required to tolerate e-texts. I've found that my students who use the e-text in class on laptops generally fail to be able to effectively use the textbook. The students with the "illegal" pdf on the ipad do better, but those students who use the dead tree version in class are generally able to find information when doing the homework. However, that's all anecdotal, and I'm working on designing a study to get a statistically significant result. Unfortunately, the first pass shows that use of paper v.s. e-reader is strongly correlated with ethnicity and looks clustered on family income, so designing a meaningful study is very challenging. (the 2011 study doesn't give a meaningful answer, despite the submitters flawed argument otherwise)
I suspect the e-readers are more likely to be time pressed people who multitask alot often skimming for important points where readers of paper editions tend to close out distractions and read the full text without jumping about looking at key events in random order. E book manual owners tend to read them the same way I read the National Electrical Code going to revelant sections to answer specific questions. Other than the numbered chapters sections of the code, I would have had difficulting knowing if Hospital Isolated Ground requirements came before or after the section of low voltage wires in an elevator access shaft.
The truth shall set you free!
Get more than just 25 people.
Not everyone is the same.
Unless they had a high suspicion that e-readers cause poor retention then why even study it unless they were skewed from the start? This is like pitting peanut butter cookies versus chocolate chip cookies as cancer cures. You'll likely find that one works better than the other just by chance, but the fact is that neither of them has any cancer curing effect whatsoever. It's a suspicious, stupid study.
If you asked me what the plot line is for the book that I am currently reading, I couldn't tell you off of the top of my head. However, after picking up the text and reading for five minutes, I would be able to spell out the plot, the characters, and their back story. When I read a physical book, I have better memory of what's going on. The reason is that a physical book provides clues that aids in memory recall, such as the cover art, size, shape, etc. These clues can be more easily recalled and associated with the story than plain text.
However, with a text book it's somewhat different. You read the text book over a longer period of time and, presumably, you have lectures and homework which re-enforces the ideas.
I still have the old keyboard Kindle. I've thought about getting the new Paperwhite but I prefer the physical buttons for turning pages. However, I'd buy a new Kindle in an instant if Amazon came out with a high resolution colour e-Ink version that showed cover art, etc. I'm not interested in the Kindle Fire, simply because I enjoy reading books on the beach.
... an e-reader saves a LOT of shelf space, making it WORTH it!
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Did they consider this:
http://hbr.org/2012/03/hard-to...
Maybe you have the wrong e-reader. When you turn on the Kobo, the cover of the ebook is displayed for half a second before it switches to the last opened page. Also, the Kobo keeps track of which books you've read and how much of the book you've gone through.
The shortcomings with the Kobo are:
1 - No color.
2 - Books are hard to place into series order, and hard to arrange on bookshelves.
3 - Conversion from one format to another sometimes causes paragraphs to merge. This makes it hard to read.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Love my Kindle DX and read on it daily. A mixture of non-fiction and much beloved fiction, the later I tend to read over and over. Being a monochrome display, its not much for diagrams or illustrations. Oddly enough, the color screen of a tablet is really not much of an improvement. For some material large format, high quality printing is mandatory -- my autographed copy of Ansel Adams prints, for instance. And I would have loved to have my textbooks from university days long past in this format. Nice part... once you have read it, deletion is so clean. No trash to take out. But with paper there is no display to crack or fail and no batteries to recharge. And we won't even mention velum or parchment for the really fine books...
I wouldn't be surprised if the more idiosyncratic tactile experience of reading a physical book positively affects the reader's ability to memorize the content.
Takes a bit getting used to, so just read your favorite novel on one first and you will be fully acclimated.
I don't do much ebook reading, but I can assure you that since I tend to read books random access*, I can easily get plot sequences out of line.
This is not specifically an ebook problem, if it's any kind of problem at all.
*Yeah. I skip around sometimes. The author is not the boss of me. If I want to jump ahead, cheat and see the ending early, whatever... that's how I read it.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
e-books are less weight meaning they travel more often, and I am reading on average twice what I did on dead trees. Single data point entered.
Bye!
(Note, I tried to make the subject line read, "Books>Kindle>Audiobooks", but for some reason, Slashdot removed the ">"s.)
I absorb least of all from audiobooks, only partly because I usually fall asleep in the first five minutes.
Ever since the Kindle app got rid of the little graphical representation of where you are in the book (like a timeline, at the bottom, where you saw whether you were 1/4 of the way through, halfway or close to the end), I've been a little uncomfortable with my ebooks.
Say what you will about those old paper-and-board book things, at least you knew exactly where you were, and could get some mental image of the progression of the narrative arc. So when you'd only got maybe 1/10th of the book read (based upon the fact that only a little bit of the book was on the left hand side) and you were reading a mystery, you could pretty much rest assured that there were some pretty big plot twists to come. Maybe that has something to do with any less absorption from ebooks (if there really is less, which I doubt this study proves).
Even so, I read mostly everything on a tablet, except sheet music. And when a really good sheet music e-book reader (and editor) comes out at less than $2000, I'm going to grab one. Musical manuscripts are just too small, even on a 10" tablet. I need to be able to see two pages of music at a time (at least).
You are welcome on my lawn.
The students scored as well as or higher on tests. My guess is they just scored as well as, in which case it would be equally valid to say they scored no worse than users of traditional printed textbooks.
How to lie with statistics.
For me anyway, it doesn't matter what I am reading on (paper or kindle or tablet), what's more important is if the content interests me at all. Give me any book I dislike and I will fail to remember much of anything about it. Give me something I really enjoy and I'll remember most of the details. A 28 page story doesn't matter if it's boring me after the first page or two it'll be lucky if I can remember the plot because my mind will wander onto other things while I try to concentrate on the boring story putting me to sleep.
I am a bibliophile, and much prefer to read a book to my kindle.
Nonetheless, I travel a lot and a kindle is inarguably an advantage for me.
I found the kindle was terribly distracting for at least the first month, until I settled down and didn't have to think at all about using it. So I would like to see this test done with experienced users.
-Styopa
"Have we reached the limits of their usefulness?"
Ummm...no? Seriously, WTF? Sure, the study is interesting, but what limits are we talking about? I suppose the Kindle might not be the best choice for reading a history text, but aside from that, meh.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I absorb least of all from audiobooks, only partly because I usually fall asleep in the first five minutes.
While this is a problem (and I find that if I listen to an audiobook in bed, I generally lose several chapters before I wake up annoyed to find my headphones still on), Audiobooks - in my case, are absolutely amazing - I generally limit my commute-time "reading" to fiction, but even re-reading a book I've read on paper can result in a much more immersive experience through a good audiobook (I do have some favorite narrators/speakers - some manage to extract meaning and intonation that I didn't remember feeling in the original, but when I re-read the passage on text, I find it appropriate).
I look forward to many many more books going "audio" soon.
In my tests, paper books were far more absorbent than Kindle readers (either eInk or touchscreen). The average paperback book will absorb about 3 deciliters, while the Kindles didn't really absorb anything. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Kindles were uniformly inoperable after the absorption testing, but that is beyond the scope of this study.
The Elizabeth George study included only two experienced Kindle users, and she is keen to replicate it using a greater proportion of Kindle regulars. But she warned against assuming that the "digital natives" of today would perform better.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
If you are comparing a dedicated ereader to a printed book, I would be wondering why retention would be better with the print version. That is particularly true when you are looking at a short text, where things like pages read is less relevant.
Now if you're talking about real reading situations, I can understand there being a difference. I would imagine that people are more likely to pickup and drop the book at different intervals (the benefit of portability). I would imagine that people are also more prone to jumping between books (the benefit of large memories). For general purpose devices, I would imagine that people are more prone to responding to notifications (the benefit of integrated and connected devices). But that's not what the study is examining.
I find that I have trouble concentrating on an audio book vs printed/e-book.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I wonder how familiar the readers using the kindles where with the device. I imagine that if you are using it for the first time it would be somewhat distracting until you get used to it.
null
I read a little slower. I have no A-B-A "test" to tell!
I never lose my place and the "book" lays open instead always wanting to close. Since I don't read for more than 30 minutes at a time, those things are a decent +.
That was Zen, this is Tao
I have both an iPad and Kindle. A few things with the iPad...I touch a word, the dictionary entry comes up. This is quite helpful. I am used to referring to the progress bar so sequence recall isn't a problem. Some books have x-Ray enabled, and that helps with story cohesion. Basically, after I've spent a lot of time with the iPad reader, I find it as good or better than paper. Except for the beach.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
One thing that goes away with the Kindle is the ability to use your fingers as temporary bookmarks while you flip pages back and forth to look something up. Advanced book users might use several of these bookmarks at one point if the information is spread across chapters. Even the simple "partially turn page to see what's on the other side without losing focus of the current page" isn't working.
Yet I still bought a Kindle (Paperwhite), because books aren't very readable in the dark, and I find myself switching away from the book (to Facebook, news-site-I-fancy-reading-now, jeu-de-l'heure) on a multi-purpose tablet. Haven't tried learning with it though. I use it to put myself to sleep :)
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
Cue the slue of idiots talking about how books "have a smell."
I managed to graduate with an English Honours degree using as many ebooks as I could on my Handspring Edge and then Palm Tungsten E. I was cheap, and old books are in the public domain, so I made a point of taking classes that focused on older works.
Biggest advantage (aside from price) was that I could read the same books on my laptop in class, and use the search functions to find spots in the text later.
Downside was that bibliography standards hadn't been updated yet for e-texts...
Now what if they had tried the study on Kobos? ;)
Odd, I find myself doing exactly the opposite. Mostly because I find it easier to open a physical manual to the index, find the page I need, and then flip to it. I find this much more difficult to do with an eReader.
I tend to focus on linear progression of the book when I read on my Kindle.
From my own experience trying to read books on a tablet, cell-phone, or other e-reader...I would disconnect from the story line frequently because while I was reading a page I was thinking about timing to flip the page before the power-saving would kick in and gray out the screen. With a physical book I can relax and enjoy.
... but I have more trouble
reading text that is squished
into the tiny window of
an e-reader. Having to manually
scroll interrupts my reading
and I tire of the experience
quickly. Maybe that has
something to do with
their reduced comprehension.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Nothing beats paper for random access.
I can flip through a paper book and find what I'm looking for easily and fast. This doesn't just apply to research texts.
"Sir Korann is... my Uncle?"
Er.., who the heck is Korann?
Or, "hmm. Did they mention that the Druids lived beyond the Ice Wall, or were they the protectors of the Great Plains..?"
In a paper book, it's very easy to flip back through and find stuff. It's fun.
On an eReader.., that kind of random, non-linear search is a serious pain in the ass. -Doable, but it takes a lot of steps. More often than not I just don't bother and consequently I find myself thinking, "Well, this is annoying. It'd be nice if this were a real book."
Other than that, if a reader isn't eInk, then the glow of the screen is affecting the user in certain ways. My eyes get tired faster, and there's the constant nagging worry deep in your mind of, "I gotta recharge this device at some point."
Little nags like that add up.
Which is not to say that I don't use my little Sony eInk reader plenty. It's advantages are well appreciated. But for fast random access..? Lousy.