The Science of Reading

While doing some research, I came across an interesting article in a back issue of Scientific American entitled "The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens". The article looks at various research conducted to determine how the brain reads paper versus electronic content. Here are some of the findings:

- attitudes towards e-reading have changed as e-readers and tablets have improved in technology (e-books make up 15 to 20 per cent of trade book sales in the US);

- recent research has found few differences between paper and electronic text in terms of our reading speed and comprehension;

- aside from lacking the "tactile" experience and pleasure of reading a paper book, e-readers do not allow us the same ability to navigate through long texts in "an intuitive and satisfying way," and may drain more of our mental resources while reading, thus making it harder to remember what we have read;

- the human brain may also "perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape". An electronic text lacks the "topography" of a paper book, which allows us to read individual pages without losing track of the whole of the book. The e-reader allows us to view a page at a time without the sense of what came before and what will follow.

The article concludes that rather than trying to replicate the features of a paper book, e-reading technology should evolve to reflect the strengths of the medium:

Why not keep paper and evolve screen-based reading into something else entirely? Screens obviously offer readers experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Moby Dick, but the New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that depend entirely on scrolling and could not appear in print in the same way. Some Web comics and infographics turn scrolling into a strength rather than a weakness.

For the full text of the article, please see http://www.scientificamerican.com/art....