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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 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?
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
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
That wouldn't explain the different results among kindle folks versus paper folks, though.
I suspect that the lack of physical pages does make a difference in terms of knowing where you are in a book. I certainly know that I can often open a physical book to the location of something I remember and come really close, particularly if it's a book I'm studying, but even for novels.
But knowing exactly where you are in a book does not necessarily affect your comprehension of the book. I don't see any reason why it should. So yes, the lack of positional memory may make a difference in some test methodologies, but it doesn't mean people get less out of reading Kindle books. I mean, books on tape give you a completely different experience of the book than a paper book too; in some ways you probably get more, and in some ways less. This is the same sort of thing, I think.
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)
Do you know what would explain the difference? The fact that only 2 people from the Kindle group had used one before. That is going to throw the results, I think.
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.
Which doesn't explain why the ones reading it on paper act differently.
I find both effects described are plausible. It's certainly true that the human memory by associating items with physical locations. Order particularly. It's how memory experts operate using memory palaces or the method of loci. It may be that the physical nature of a book (or a shorter form) gives the brain more to hang the details of the story on. That the reader can feel the weight and size, and is repeatedly seeing the front page, and can at all times how far through the page or document or book they are.
Its also plausible that ebooks perform better as textbooks, because whilst they'll lose out on the features I mentioned above they benefit from greater efficiency with hyperlinks and searching, such that they can be a better tool for learning. (Learning being different from memorizing. It includes the concept of first understanding the material.)
Same here. No difference at all for entertainment literature.
25 each is too small a study to be sure, this could be a statistical anomaly. It is also possible that they had A4 sheets for the paper version while smaller pages on the Kindle that cannot display that much text at one go. Unless they give them a proper small paperback for comparison, they could have a lot of sources of error. Also, the information how well they did is missing. The given data would fit 2 getting it right on paper and one just on Kindle.
The one issue I have with the Kindle is that reading technical books does not work too well. For them, I pencil in remarks and highlights, and the Kindle functionality for that is not really usable. Also, technical books often have formulas and pictures which do not work too well either. Still useful to carry around reference material and I would not want an A4-sized Kindle either. But a pencil-like interface for annotations and some other improvements are needed before I will go all e-book.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm with medv. I much the way people wake up just before their alarm clock goes off, I think we subconsciously keep track of where we are in the book, and the pages give us a concrete measuring stick to judge by. Then we can relate passages of the story to physical locations in the paper book, giving us more of a timeline reference. At least, that makes sense to my experience with ereaders v books.
Did they consider this:
http://hbr.org/2012/03/hard-to...
Absolutely. Everyone's heard of these new fangled 'ereaders', but not necessarily had the interest in trying one. These non-adopters/non-curious people might be more caught up in the apparent novelty and newness, than what they're reading.
I bet you would have seen a similar effect from watching a documentary in black and white vs color right when color TV's started to supplant black and white.
Other confounding variables could include age; people who use kindles (or gadgets in general) would tend to be younger than non-users. Age related memory/recall is a pretty standard concept. (But the study referenced by TFA seem to have avoided this via focusing on teenagers -- which also brings to the table other potential issues; for example associations that they might have about reading on a screen (IE, paper = serious business; computer screen = facebook.)
The researchers already explained the difference:
Oh, wait, that's not even bad reporting. That's obviously just a guess.
Most research, properly done, has a "findings" section with numbers, and a "conclusion" where researchers can speculate wildly with no support. It may be named differently depending on the discipline, but there is always a place for people to say "we guess this might be the explanation".
Especially when this is among the very first research of its kind - we don't know what kind of variables to control for. Obviously, based on the other reply to this comment.
We have to get in the habit of saying this is a finding, but this other thing is just a guess. Kindle readers *in this study* that were selected *by this methodology* did poorly on *this* test. The explanation could be anything that was not controlled for.
Slashdot readers, don't get in the habit of assuming "this is different" means "this is the cause". And educate your friends, and your journalists, that "A researcher said..." only carries weight when you don't take them out of context. And yes, taking random-ass hypotheses from the end of a press release and reporting it as a definitive explanation is FRAUD and FALSIFICATION.
The one issue I have with the Kindle is that reading technical books does not work too well. For them, I pencil in remarks and highlights, and the Kindle functionality for that is not really usable. Also, technical books often have formulas and pictures which do not work too well either.
I agree that pictures and diagrams suck on a Kindle, but the highlighting is fantastic, I've been using it a lot since I found out that in my Kindle library online I can access all the text I have highlighted, ever. In the past I used to stop reading whenever I would find something interesting that inspired me to do some googling, or when I would learn about some other book mentioned by the author. Now I simply highlight stuff and I look it up later. A lot more convenient.
Also it's possible to lookup a word or sentence in wikipedia without leaving the page, there is a small pop-up window for that. Hugely convenient. Same thing with the built-in dictionary; that's what I used to brush up my Spanish since it's possible to have 1 default dictionary per language.
And finally there is the Audible sync thing. I can listen to an audiobook while driving, and when I get home I can pick up where I left reading on my Kindle, the audio and ebooks are synchronized. I have to buy both but there is a big discount. It's not ideal for deeply technical books, but it works well for other kinds of non-fiction like business books or biographies. And it is awesome for fiction.
I would not go back to reading paper books or ebooks on a tablet. For a while I had access to O'Reilly Safari and while they have a large selection of technical books it is pretty subpar as far as e-reading goes, I hated it.
lucm, indeed.
While I am certainly not a statistician, 25 subjects in each group sounds suspect. "Twice as likely" always makes me wonder what the absolute numbers are...
If 3 people messed up the plot order on paper and 6 people on the kindle, that gives a result "twice as likely", but does that really mean this test would repeat similarly with 10000 subjects.
TFA says:
"The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure, ie, when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order."
all of them? a few of them? what is "significantly"?
all of them? a few of them? what is "significantly"?
There is another important question: Who funded this study, and why did they fund it?
The market for education materials is HUGE, and there are vested interest groups that do NOT want schools moving to tablets, where they may not be able to control the curriculum. So they fund a study that finds that people don't learn well on tablets.
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
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.
The thing about the kindle is it comes somewhere between a paperback that you would take to the beach and an iPad that you would treat with great care. I bung a kindle in a rucksack if I'm camping, take it around places where I wouldn't bring an iPad - if it did get broken or nicked it would be annoying but not that annoying.
Do you know what would explain the difference? The fact that only 2 people from the Kindle group had used one before. That is going to throw the results, I think.
Bingo. It takes some time to get used to read on an e-reader, to navigate through pages and place bookmarks - a person who has never used a kindle will naturally have a hard time knowing and remembering how to put bookmarks, how to go back to them, how to flip pages back and forth.
Experience should have been handled as a control variable. Since it was not, one has to infer some type of correlation with the results. At best, given the experiment, one can ask if there was such a correlation. Another variable that needed to be under control is education.
Have people with minimal, but effective experience using the device and comparable education, and have them read several documents. For each document, ask the same questions as in the original experiment. Rinse and repeat.
As it is, though, the research has value if it points in the direction of usability for people new to e-readers.