14 DAY TRIAL // eReaders and a growing number of digital textbooks have transformed the way we grasp and access knowledge, but while the transition from traditional reading standards has been hailed as being beneficial, a new study shows us a different side of the story.
Sure, it’s nice not to have to carry a big backpack filled with heavy books every day you go to class and instead have all your textbooks uploaded on a light tablet, but the benefits might end here.
As The Guardian notes, researchers from Europe wanted to find out how well users of Kindle eReaders and physical books retained the information they extracted from their reads.
The study was conducted on 50 participants who were given a task of reading a 28-page short story. Half of them were granted a Kindle eReader in order to do so, while the other half was instructed to use the paperback version.
After everybody was done reading, all participants were invited to take a pop quiz, which grilled them about several elements and details of the story.
Most results proved to be quite similar, but one particular striking discovery was made. Kindle readers were shown to have greater difficulty reconstructing the order of events.
“The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure, when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order,” says one of the researchers.
The problem, according to people behind the study? It appears that haptic and tactile feedback on the Kindle does not sustain mental reconstruction of a story as well as a printed physical book does.
“When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on left growing, and shrinking on the right. You have the tactile sense of progress, in addition to the visual.”
One of the researchers in the group also conducted a study last year in which she gave 72 10th graders texts to read in either print or PDF on a computer screen. She then administered a bunch of tests and discovered that students reading in print scored much better than those grasping the text digitally.
The research team hopes their efforts will help publishers and the public understand what kind of devices should be used for what kind of content. For example, it’s no harm reading a light travel novel on the Kindle, but if you have an essay to write about a complicated literary work, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, you had better go to the library.