A Short History of the E-Reader
For this final task I explore the history of the E-Reader and its impact on literacy and eduction.
References
Anderson, T. L. (2018). E-readers make a difference for diverse readers. International Journal of Technology in Education and Science, 2(1), 40.
Baron, N. S. (2020). The digital revolution and the future of american reading. In S. Belasco, T. S. Gaul, L. Johnson & M. Soto (Eds.), (pp. 480-498). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119056157.ch92
Bolter, J. D. (2014). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Echevarría, J., Vogt, M., & Short, D. (2017). Making content comprehensible for english learners: The SIOP model (Fifth ed.). Pearson.
Eutsler, L., & Trotter, J. (2020). Print or iPad? young children’s text type shared reading preference and behaviors in comparison to parent predictions and at-home practices. Literacy Research and Instruction, 59(4), 324-345. https://doi.org/10.1080/19388071.2020.1777229
Huddleston Jr., T. (2021). Remember these failed apple products? they were some of the tech giant’s biggest flops. CNBC.com. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/from-the-newton-to-lisa-failed-apple-products.html
Lamb, R., & McCormick, J. (2020). Stuff to blow your mind. from the vault: Invention of the book. part 2. iHeartMedia, Inc.
Pogue, D. (2010). New kindle leaves rivals farther back. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/technology/personaltech/26pogue.html?_r=1
Transcript
00:00
Hello, today we’re going to take a short journey into the history of the E-Reader to look at its impact on literacy and education.
00:06
To begin with we’re going to look at some of the major device milestones as noted by Baron (2020) between the time period of 1993 and 2010.
00:13
Baron notes that handheld devices or PDA’s (personal digital assistant devices) were designed for reading and writing capabilities in mind and these started to appear in the 1990s.
00:20
This started with Apple’s Newton in 1993. Hudderson Jr (2021) of CNBC highlights Newton’s portability as a key innovation which was meant to launch the handheld revolution.
00:31
He states “the Newton featured an innovative handwriting feature where users wrote on the device’s screen with a stylus pen and the Newton would translate the handwriting into digital text…the handwriting recognition feature did not work as well as Apple had hoped, too often resulting in an indecipherable jumble of words.” Because of this the promise of innovation was not matched by the technological capabilities of the time and Apple’s Newton failed.
00:53
In 1999 the Rocket E-Book and in 2006 the Sony E-Reader devices came out and they started to look more like what a physical paperback book would look like. These devices focused more on reading capabilities rather than writing. They used LCD screens and text was displayed in monochromatic form.
01:09
With the Amazon Kindle in 2007 the technology of how the text was displayed changed a little bit and we’ll talk a bit more about that coming up. But it was at this time that ebooks became a viable competitor to print books. Amazon reduced the price of e-books to $9.99 so the price was less than buying a physical book which encouraged more people to try out E-Readers and as such ebooks overtook the sales of hardcover books. E-books and E-Readers were now reaching the masses.
01:42
But it was in 2010 when the iPad, a tablet computer, came out and competition between physical books and ebooks really came into full form.
Until the mid 2000s digital reading was done overwhelmingly on desktop or laptop computers and users could expect to encounter texts of the same length and complexity found in print versions as noted by Baron (2020). How you interacted with the iPad was different than how you might have interacted with the E-Reader as was how the text was displayed. The device also offered more capabilities so e-reading was a function among many that the device was capable of.
02:09
So if we look at e-text to now we want to take a moment to think about where did this all start. In 1971 Project Gutenberg was started and aimed to take texts already freely available in print form to the public and put them into electronic form.
By the mid 1990s there was an online explosion of material due to the internet becoming more publicly accessible. The internet was starting to be a fixture in everyone’s home. But people were still accessing information through computers that were tethered to your telephone or internet cable. It wasn’t mobile, it wasn’t portable.
So when E-Readers became more mainstream how and when we interacted with electronic text also changed. Unlike desktop computers the E-Reader tries to imitate the physical presence of the codex as noted by Bolter (2014).
02:56
Kindle’s E Ink really took the concept to the next level because it looked like the ink did on paper as noted by Pogue (2010). He notes that it was satisfying to read and the results really did look like traditional paper text. He also notes that it was great for battery life as if you were only turning pages your charge could last for a month. But the drawbacks that he highlights are that it was really slow to turn the pages. There is a time lag of a second which didn’t really work well as it caused frustration for the reader. He also notes that because of the technology of E Ink and its speed capabilities it could never display any type of video or interactive text; it could simply only be text on the screen like a printed book on paper.
03:50
So culturally this brings up the question of what is a book? I wanted to take a moment to look at a discussion that happened in The Invention of the Book Part Two – Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast. Lamb and McCormick (2020) ponder “about how the format of the scroll versus the codex would cause people to think differently about what books were used for”. As electronic text can be displayed in scroll format on some E-Readers this is an interesting point.
04:11
With the Kindles and the e-books that came before you engage with the text through simulated flipping of a page much like a traditional book. But when we get devices like an iPad you’re able to scroll through text so their question of how we interact with the text on the screen and how the device displays text possibly makes us think differently about what a book is simply through how we interact with it. Unlike a traditional scroll we are able to search and use hyperlinks to navigate though. But is this a book without the flipping of pages or something different?
04:34
I wanted to quickly just share a bit of my experience when I first started the MET program. I was printing out the different articles and annotating them. Highlighting them as I normally would but this became impractical as I no longer had a printer. This is no longer technology that exists within my household as it would have when I was in university for my undergrad. So I’ve started to use my iPad and Apple Pencil and in using these devices I’m able to annotate and take notes exactly the same way it would on paper. I can search quickly through my notes and carry a volume of texts that was not as convenient 15 years ago. So because of innovation I’m now able to read and write within one device where I wasn’t able to before. It’s sort of gone to where Apple’s Newton wanted to be; it just took a bit of time and technology advancement.
05:05
So some of the benefits of e-reading.
Their portability. Adjustable font size. The ability to have links ( hypertext). Text-to-Speech and backlighting are some of the positive aspects of E-Readers that draw people to them. All of these benefits can have applications to support learners within education if purposefully used (except for maybe the backlighting).
05:42
Some of the concerns are definitely the distractions depending on the type of interactivity and the hyperlinks available within the text. As educators we must ask is it aiding learning or is it a distraction? We must consider the cost. Not everyone might have access to a device even though almost everyone is likely to have a smartphone. We must also recognize that smartphones might not be the best device to interact with text on within educational settings. Students may associate their phone primarily with communication not reading. So it might be that you need a different E-Reader rather than a smartphone.
Battery life is also a concern. We’re charging our smartphones and our tablets a lot more than you would with one of the traditional E-Readers and of course you never have to charge a book.
06:15
But, back to the cultural debate about what is a book? Jeff Bezos Amazon’s chief executive responded to this point by saying “you are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets” and then Pogue (2010) says “yes but color and video may well improve the new era of a livelier ebook”
06:33
So again there’s this idea of what is a book? What are we classifying as one? Are we destroying classic texts or are we improving them? No one necessarily agrees on this and as noted by Baron (2020) “the digital revolution potentially changes our notion of what it means to read we need to consider the impact of not just pixels but of sound waves”. So this brings in the idea of audio books and other media when considering what is a book? What do we classify as a book?
06:57
Culturally this is the content versus container debate of what is a book. Baron (2020) states the argument is that if we’re mentally absorbed then the medium is irrelevant but also to reduce all reading to the engagement of a plot line or character development oversimplifies the world of reading” and as an educator I agree with this. That it is not just about engagement it’s how the students are engaging and does the form of the text aid in their learning.
07:19
But if the context in which reading is taking place is considered the “container may indeed matter [as] some considerations are cognitive. Several are aesthetic and sensory. And others are pragmatic.” So as educators we have to think about this. We need to consider the student. Consider the context and the purpose.
Ebooks are not likely to be replaced by physical books or vice versa. It’s the right text for the right context. So as Eutsler & Trotter (2020) say “”text type options appear to influence children’s reading motivation”. So as we’re selecting and offering texts to students we need to think about this. If an ebook engages a reluctant reader and they are able to access more than in print form this may be the right choice for that student.
07:50
It’s the right text, for the right context, for the student and we need to stop thinking about it as an either-or argument as it can simply be both. The right text, for the right context.
08:01
Thank you, here are my references.
All images used in this presentation are used under Canva’s free media licensing agreement.
Thank you.