E-Reader Comprehension

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

There’s a video that went viral a couple of years ago, and Grant, I wonder if you’ve seen it.

In it, this little one-year-old girl sits happily playing with an iPad, and she’s hitting icons and shuffling them around, and you hear these little squeals of delight.

And then in the next scene, you see her sitting in the same position, but this time she’s looking at a magazine, and she’s trying to do the same thing.

It looks like she’s trying to do the same thing, you know, kind of swiping and pinching and poking at it, kind of touching her leg to see if…

How her finger works?

Yeah, if her finger works.

Is this thing on?

Yeah.

Is this finger on?

Right.

Right.

And she seems frustrated.

And the video is called, A Magazine is an iPad that does not work.

I like that.

Maybe she thought it should work like an iPad.

Or maybe she was just being a baby, just kind of touching everything.

But it raises a really good question about the fact that there’s a lot that’s wonderful about e-readers.

But it still is a different experience from reading a book.

And there was a fascinating piece in Scientific American magazine recently.

It was a roundup of a lot of the research.

And it interested me because a lot of the research that’s coming out shows that your comprehension is pretty much the same when you read on an e-reader, but in many cases the research showed it was slightly less than if you just read something in print.

So let me guess, is this because you have more interruptions?

You get email in the middle of reading and you go check that, or is it because you’re tempted by all these other applications, or is it because there’s music playing in the background and the song changes and you want to go fix that?

Well, you’re zeroing in on what they’re talking about in this article.

One thing that they mention is just the feel of the electronic reader itself, besides all the potential interruptions.

What they call haptic dissonance, haptic coming from the Greek word to touch or grasp, that there’s just something different about reading something that doesn’t feel like a book, where you’re turning the pages and you can see how far you’ve been and how far you have to go.

Because with an e-reader, you’re still just scrolling this endless stream of text.

But so many of them include that.

They include a bar on the side or the bottom that shows you how far into the text you are.

Yeah, but I think what they’re saying is that for a lot of people, it’s just a different experience of sort of where you are in space, in the space of the book.

And maybe you’re spending a little bit of energy.

I’m totally with you on that.

I don’t know if it applies perfectly, but I have a very good spatial memory.

I can usually find a passage that I’m looking for because I remember where in the page it was.

Oh, I do too.

Exactly.

Which side of the two pages?

It could be years ago.

And I can actually find, I may not remember exactly where in the book, but I know where in the page, which side of the page.

Right, right.

I can too.

I can picture exactly where it is.

And I also saw some research in there.

There was a study of college students, and almost 80% of them said that if they really want to understand something, they read it in a book rather than.

Very interesting.

Yeah, and there are other studies that show that people have very similar comprehension if they’re reading on an e-book or a book.

But then if they’re asked to do other kinds of tasks afterwards, like memory tasks or repetitive tasks, the ones who are reading on something electronic have a harder time.

And maybe they’re more fatigued somehow.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s all very preliminary research.

But I was reading this article online and I got more and more pulled into it, more and more fascinated.

And then I thought, wait a minute, I’ve got to print this out and read it because there’s so much there to understand.

And I did.

That’s exactly how I ended up reading it.

I’m looking forward to reading those articles.

We’ll link to them on the website.

We want your opinion.

Do you find that you absorb more when you read on paper?

Or do you find that the ability to carry around hundreds or thousands of books on an e-reader outweighs whatever kind of loss there would be?

Right.

As somebody said on our Facebook page, paper or plastic?

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