It Takes Me Longer, Because I Read More Carefully – E-Books vs. Print Books

• 10 years ago
• Posted in:Assignment 1: 3 Posts, Digital literacies and multiliteracies, Mechanization: before and after, Post 3, Re: Module 3
• 4
• Author: Joshua Campbell

I was caught off guard by a Washington Post article that I read recently that indicated that students – that is, current, young, college students – have a preference for printed text over its electronic counterpart. (Rosenwald, 2015)  While this seems, on the surface, sophistic, research is showing it to be true.

When we consider Raymond Kurzweil’s 1999 prognostication that, “The [print] book will enter obsolescence, although because of its long history and enormous installed base, it will linger for a couple of decades before reaching antiquity” (as quoted in Bolter, 2001), it is fascinating to note that, “the highest print readership rates are among those ages 18 to 29, and the same age group is still using public libraries in large numbers.” (Rosenwald, 2015)  In her book, “Words Onscreen – The Fate of Reading in a Digital World”, Naomi Baron seeks to understand some of the rationale behind this phenomenon.

Several key reasons for students preference of print text were highlighted by Baron (2015).  Students forced to study using e-texts complain about eyestrain, distractibility and poorer recall of material.  From a personal perspective, I suffer all three of these e-text maladies.  I have recently invested in reading glasses to both help my aging eyes and filter out some of the “blue” light of digital screens, I am among the 90% that admit to multitasking while reading online (vs the 1% of print-text readers) (Baron 2015) and I like so many others, rely partly on the “location of information simply by page and text layout — that, say, the key piece of dialogue was on that page early in the book with that one long paragraph and a smudge on the corner.”  (Rosenwald, 2015)  This physicality can lead to greater engagement, as one student commented, reading print books “ takes me longer because I read more carefully.”  (Baron, 2015)

While e-text has made undeniable inroads into our reading space, it is not (and I would predict will never be) a total annihilation of the printed book.  Pearson Education  president Don Kilburn, sums up this shift, “the move to digital doesn’t look like a revolution right now. It looks like an evolution, and it’s lumpy at best.”  (Baron, 2015)  In fact, in a fascinating white-paper report commissioned by Ricoh in 2013, e-Book revenue accounts for only 20-30% of total profits for major publishers of all sizes.  

So why, with all of the features and accessibility of electronic text, is the printed book still vastly prefered?  Perhaps that reading and writing indeed has a materiality built into its nature.  Chartier explains, “Whether they are in manuscript or in print, books are objects whose forms, if they cannot impose the sense of the texts that they bear, at least command the uses that can invest them and the appropriations to which they are susceptible. Works and discourses exist only when they become physical realities … This means that … keen attention should be paid to the technical, visual, and physical devices that organize the reading of writing when writing becomes a book”. (as quoted in Bolter, 2001)

Further, Baron comments that e-books, “resemble motel rooms – bland and efficient.  [Print] Books are home – real, physical things you can love and cherish and make your own, till death do you part.  Or till you run out of shelf space.” (Baron, 2015)

This may also speak to the anthropomorphization of books as described by Bolter (2001).   Books have names and places in which they live, be it on our shelves, in boxes or in libraries.  The codex also allows for a sense of closure – a beginning and end, that is diminishing in the light of the hypertextualization of electronic text.

I have no doubt that there will always be printed books, `but am curious as to how the balance will play out in the decades to come.

References:

Baron, N. (2015) Words Onscreen – The Fate of Reading in a Digital World.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Bolter, J. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahway, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Roserwald, M. (2015, February 22)  Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right.  Washington Post.  Retreived from https://www.washingtonpost.com