Image: Robert Drózd, Wikimedia Commons
In
a viral YouTube video
from October 2011 a one-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an
iPad's touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes
she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as
though they too were screens. When nothing happens, she pushes against
her leg, confirming that her finger works just fine—or so a title card
would have us believe.
The girl's father,
Jean-Louis Constanza,
presents "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" as naturalistic
observation—a Jane Goodall among the chimps moment—that reveals a
generational transition. "Technology codes our minds," he writes in the
video's description. "Magazines are now useless and impossible to
understand, for digital natives"—that is, for people who have been
interacting with digital technologies from a very early age.
Perhaps his daughter really did expect the paper magazines to respond
the same way an iPad would. Or maybe she had no expectations at
all—maybe she just wanted to touch the magazines.
Babies touch everything. Young children who have never seen a tablet like the iPad or an e-reader like the Kindle will
still reach out
and run their fingers across the pages of a paper book; they will jab
at an illustration they like; heck, they will even taste the corner of a
book. Today's so-called
digital natives
still interact with a mix of paper magazines and books, as well as
tablets, smartphones and e-readers; using one kind of technology does
not preclude them from understanding another.
Nevertheless, the video brings into focus an important question: How
exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read? How
reading on screens differs from reading on paper is relevant not just to
the
youngest among us,
but to just about everyone who reads—to anyone who routinely switches
between working long hours in front of a computer at the office and
leisurely reading paper magazines and books at home; to people who have
embraced e-readers for their convenience and portability, but admit that
for some reason they still prefer reading on paper; and to those who
have already
vowed to forgo
tree pulp entirely. As digital texts and technologies become more
prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading—but are we still
reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond
differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be
worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the
validity of such concerns paper-thin?
Since at least the 1980s researchers in many different fields—including
psychology, computer engineering, and library and information
science—have investigated such questions in more than one hundred
published studies. The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992
most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies
published since the early 1990s,
however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has
confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few
significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper
and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still
prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing
as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books
for facts and fun becomes more common. In the U.S., e-books currently
make up
between 15 and
20 percent of all trade book sales.
Even so, evidence from
laboratory experiments, polls and
consumer reports
indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate
certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss
and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an
intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties
may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens
may also drain more of our
mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A
parallel line of research
focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether
they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a
state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to
paper.
"There is physicality in reading," says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist
Maryanne Wolf
of Tufts University, "maybe even more than we want to think about as we
lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little
reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms,
but know when to use the new."
Navigating textual landscapes
Understanding how reading on paper is different from reading on screens
requires some explanation of how the brain interprets written language.
We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the
abstract—with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs.
As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of
the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially regards
letters as physical objects because it does not really have another way
of understanding them. As Wolf explains in her book
Proust and the Squid,
we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we
did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary
history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises
a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of
neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor
coordination and vision.
Some of these repurposed brain regions are specialized for
object recognition—they
are networks of neurons that help us instantly distinguish an apple
from an orange, for example, yet classify both as fruit. Just as we
learn that certain features—roundness, a twiggy stem, smooth
skin—characterize an apple, we learn to recognize each letter by its
particular arrangement of lines, curves and hollow spaces. Some of the
earliest forms of writing, such as
Sumerian cuneiform, began as characters
shaped like the objects they represented—a
person's head, an ear of barley, a fish. Some researchers see traces of
these origins in modern alphabets: C as crescent moon, S as snake.
Especially intricate characters—such as Chinese
hanzi and Japanese
kanji—activate
motor regions in the brain involved in forming those characters on
paper: The brain literally goes through the motions of writing when
reading, even if the hands are empty. Researchers
recently discovered that the same thing happens in a milder way when some people read cursive.
Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain
may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical
landscape. When we read, we construct a
mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are
likely similar
to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and
trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices.
Both anecdotally and
in published studies,
people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written
information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might
recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail
before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way,
we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on
the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen
text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined
domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which
to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book
without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book
begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One
can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to
be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving
one footprint after another on the trail—there's a rhythm to it and a
visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only
make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to
form a coherent mental map of the text.
In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere
with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the
journey in their minds. A reader of digital text might scroll through a
seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the
search function to immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is
difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text. As
an analogy, imagine if Google Maps allowed people to navigate street by
individual street, as well as to teleport to any specific address, but
prevented them from zooming out to see a neighborhood, state or country.
Although e-readers like the Kindle and tablets like the iPad re-create
pagination—sometimes complete with page numbers, headers and
illustrations—the screen only displays a single virtual page: it is
there and then it is gone. Instead of hiking the trail yourself, the
trees, rocks and moss move past you in flashes with no trace of what
came before and no way to see what lies ahead.
"The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized," says
Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of
The Myth of the Paperless Office.
"Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think
e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize
where you are in a book."
At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension. In
a study published in January 2013
Anne Mangen
of the University of Stavanger in Norway and her colleagues asked 72
10th-grade students of similar reading ability to study one narrative
and one expository text, each about 1,500 words in length. Half the
students read the texts on paper and half read them in pdf files on
computers with 15-inch liquid-crystal display (LCD) monitors. Afterward,
students completed reading-comprehension tests consisting of
multiple-choice and short-answer questions, during which they had access
to the texts. Students who read the texts on computers performed a
little worse than students who read on paper.
Based on observations during the study, Mangen thinks that students
reading pdf files had a more difficult time finding particular
information when referencing the texts. Volunteers on computers could
only scroll or click through the pdfs one section at a time, whereas
students reading on paper could hold the text in its entirety in their
hands and quickly switch between different pages. Because of their easy
navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to
absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the
beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to
your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it
less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for
comprehension," Mangen says.
Supporting this research,
surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control.
People report
that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book when a
sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier, for example,
or quickly scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to have as much
control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily
write notes to themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper
however they choose.
Because of these preferences—and because getting away from multipurpose
screens improves concentration—people consistently say that when they
really want to dive into a text, they read it on paper. In
a 2011 survey
of graduate students at National Taiwan University, the majority
reported browsing a few paragraphs online before printing out the whole
text for more in-depth reading.
A 2008 survey
of millennials (people born between 1980 and the early 2000s) at Salve
Regina University in Rhode Island concluded that, "when it comes to
reading a book, even they prefer good, old-fashioned print". And in
a 2003 study conducted
at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, nearly 80 percent of
687 surveyed students preferred to read text on paper as opposed to on a
screen in order to "understand it with clarity".
Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences
typically associated with reading—especially tactile experiences—matter
to people more than one might assume. Text on a computer, an e-reader
and—somewhat ironically—on any touch-screen device is far more
intangible than text on paper. Whereas a paper book is made from pages
of printed letters fixed in a particular arrangement, the text that
appears on a screen is not part of the device's hardware—it is an
ephemeral image. When reading a paper book, one can feel the paper and
ink and smooth or fold a page with one's fingers; the pages make a
distinctive sound when turned; and underlining or highlighting a
sentence with ink permanently alters the paper's chemistry. So far,
digital texts have not satisfyingly replicated this kind of tactility
(although some companies are innovating,
at least with keyboards).
Paper books also have an immediately discernible size, shape and weight. We might refer to a hardcover edition of
War and Peace as a hefty tome or a paperback
Heart of Darkness
as a slim volume. In contrast, although a digital text has a
length—which is sometimes represented with a scroll or progress bar—it
has no obvious shape or thickness. An e-reader always weighs the same,
regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of
Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these
discrepancies create enough "
haptic dissonance"
to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to
look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading
sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the
convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they
might have to the feel of paper books.
Exhaustive reading
Although many old and recent studies conclude that people understand
what they read on paper more thoroughly than what they read on screens,
the differences are often small. Some experiments, however, suggest that
researchers should look not just at immediate reading comprehension,
but also at long-term memory. In
a 2003 study Kate Garland
of the University of Leicester and her colleagues asked 50 British
college students to read study material from an introductory economics
course either on a computer monitor or in a spiral-bound booklet. After
20 minutes of reading Garland and her colleagues quizzed the students
with multiple-choice questions. Students scored equally well regardless
of the medium, but differed in how they remembered the information.
Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—which is to
recall a piece of information along with contextual details, such as
where, when and how one learned it—and knowing something, which is
feeling that something is true without remembering how one learned the
information. Generally, remembering is a weaker form of memory that is
likely to fade unless it is converted into more stable, long-term memory
that is "known" from then on. When taking the quiz, volunteers who had
read study material on a monitor relied much more on remembering than on
knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on
remembering and knowing. Garland and her colleagues think that students
who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more
quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching their minds
for information from the text, trying to trigger the right memory—they
often just knew the answers.
Other researchers have suggested that people comprehend less when they read on a screen because screen-based reading is
more physically and mentally taxing
than reading on paper. E-ink is easy on the eyes because it reflects
ambient light just like a paper book, but computer screens, smartphones
and tablets like the iPad shine light directly into people's faces.
Depending on the model of the device, glare, pixilation and flickers can
also tire the eyes. LCDs are certainly gentler on eyes than their
predecessor, cathode-ray tubes (CRT), but prolonged reading on glossy
self-illuminated screens can cause eyestrain, headaches and blurred
vision. Such symptoms are so common among people who read on
screens—affecting around 70 percent of people who work long hours in
front of computers—that the American Optometric Association
officially recognizes computer vision syndrome.
Erik Wästlund
of Karlstad University in Sweden has conducted some particularly
rigorous research on whether paper or screens demand more physical and
cognitive resources. In
one of his experiments
72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ
test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting
of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words
each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported
higher levels of
stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
In
another set of experiments
82 volunteers completed the READ test on computers, either as a
paginated document or as a continuous piece of text. Afterward
researchers assessed the students' attention and working memory, which
is a collection of mental talents that allow people to temporarily store
and manipulate information in their minds. Volunteers had to quickly
close a series of pop-up windows, for example, sort virtual cards or
remember digits that flashed on a screen. Like many cognitive abilities,
working memory is a finite resource that diminishes with exertion.
Although people in both groups performed equally well on the READ test,
those who had to scroll through the continuous text did not do as well
on the attention and working-memory tests. Wästlund thinks that
scrolling—which requires a reader to consciously focus on both the text
and how they are moving it—drains more mental resources than turning or
clicking a page, which are simpler and more automatic gestures. A
2004 study conducted at the University of Central Florida reached similar conclusions.
Attitude adjustments
An emerging collection of studies emphasizes that in addition to screens
possibly taxing people's attention more than paper, people do not
always bring as much mental effort to screens in the first place.
Subconsciously, many people may think of reading on a computer or tablet
as a less serious affair than reading on paper. Based on a detailed
2005 survey of 113 people in northern California,
Ziming Liu
of San Jose State University concluded that people reading on screens
take a lot of shortcuts—they spend more time browsing, scanning and
hunting for keywords compared with people reading on paper, and are more
likely to read a document once, and only once.
When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage in what
psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—strategies such as
setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how
much one has understood along the way. In
a 2011 experiment
at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, college students took
multiple-choice exams about expository texts either on computers or on
paper. Researchers limited half the volunteers to a meager seven minutes
of study time; the other half could review the text for as long as they
liked. When under pressure to read quickly, students using computers
and paper performed equally well. When managing their own study time,
however, volunteers using paper scored about 10 percentage points
higher. Presumably, students using paper approached the exam with a more
studious frame of mind than their screen-reading peers, and more
effectively directed their attention and working memory.
Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper
and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The
star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half
years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though
they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will
grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in
the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft,
Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of
e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of
using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her
studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out
and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early
opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial
resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music
today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way,
especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social
interaction than they currently do. Books on the Kindle can
only be loaned once, for example.
To date, many engineers, designers and user-interface experts have
worked hard to make reading on an e-reader or tablet as close to reading
on paper as possible. E-ink resembles chemical ink and the simple
layout of the Kindle's screen looks like a page in a paperback.
Likewise, Apple's iBooks attempts to simulate the overall aesthetic of
paper books, including somewhat realistic page-turning. Jaejeung Kim of
KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence in South Korea and
his colleagues have designed an
innovative and unreleased interface
that makes iBooks seem primitive. When using their interface, one can
see the many individual pages one has read on the left side of the
tablet and all the unread pages on the right side, as if holding a
paperback in one's hands. A reader can also flip bundles of pages at a
time with a flick of a finger.
But why, one could ask, are we working so hard to make reading with new
technologies like tablets and e-readers so similar to the experience of
reading on the very ancient technology that is paper? 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. Similarly,
Robin Sloan has pioneered
the tap essay for mobile devices. The immensely popular interactive
Scale of the Universe tool could not have been made on paper in any practical way. New e-publishing companies like
Atavist
offer tablet readers long-form journalism with embedded interactive
graphics, maps, timelines, animations and sound tracks. And some writers
are pairing up with computer programmers to produce
ever more sophisticated interactive
fiction and
nonfiction in which one's choices determine what one reads, hears and sees next.
When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper
and ink may still have the advantage. But text is not the only way to
read.
