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Students learn more effectively from print textbooks than screens, study says

393 points by ALee 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
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quuquuquu 9y ago
This is a halfway decent article from Business Insider. I find myself 50/50 on this issue. When I need cutting edge info, or niche info, I typically read it on a screen. When I need offline info, or low power info, or simply a different aesthetic for some reason, I love a nice book. Especially for older info. Surprisingly, discovery of info is pretty boundless and fun at a large University library, because books are sorted by topics. I don't need to endlessly query Google for the most authoritative resources. Personally I really feel we need both sources of info. Both types of print have pros and cons. I don't know if I "perform" better with one type of print though. "Better" is very subjective, and when I was in college in 2010-13, all of my tests were written paragraphs/essays. Totally subjective.
acconrad 9y ago
The fourth reason is that some things can't be measured? That seems suspect. I can think of two seemingly obvious inferences from this study that were not mentioned. 1. Digital devices offer more distractions because unlike a book, you also get a slew of other apps (and the internet) at the touch of a button to distract you. Even if you are iron-willed, an OS update will pop up and break your concentration from time to time, a physical book will never present anything other than what it has already printed for you. 2. Books can be written on. I have a Kindle and I can't imagine reading something like Skiena's Algorithms book on it because the effort to take any kind of useful notes far exceeds that of a physical book. You can write in the margins, comment, highlight, all of which helps solidify your understanding. Kindles and iPads may have those things, but they are likely limited in fashion and not nearly as low of an effort to produce as with a book (unless of course it's rented for the semester and you're prohibited from writing in it).
- marak830 9y ago
  To expand upon your second point, I use a note 3 primarily: it has a digital oen built in. I almost never use it, as there is no unifed way to make notes in margins etc.
- sus_007 9y ago
  Most of the devices out there could be equipped with write-on feature should the owner install required app for it. I'm a monthly subscriber to Adobe Creative Cloud and I must say Adobe Acrobat DC is the only reader that you'll ever require. You can do almost anything that is digitally possible using the app. I can even write Javascript over my PDF documents.
ilaksh 9y ago
How big was this study? Did they test how well the students performed when they had to search for information? They say that the students read much faster on the screen. What if they just slow down a bit? The textbook industry is corrupt and will believe or promote anything to try to hold on to profits. Wasting all of that paper and making people lug around a bunch of heavy books is asinine.
pizza 9y ago
The idea that scrolling may be jarring enough to hamper reading fits my experience. When I scroll, it doesn't feel like just my browser has to repaint the whole webpage, but it also feels like my brain has to reconstitute the structure of the page via a kind of inverse-repainting, just so that I can reorient my attention, before I can resume it. In other words, if I - have a (semantic) pointer to, say, the last word on a line - am maintaining just the single last word I read in my short-term memory/register - scroll and then have to look for the line I was just on before I have reoriented myself then it feels like I have to do a kind of mechanistic attention-interrupt/syscall that locks my conscious interpretation of the text's meaning until I have returned to the index of the text that I was just at. I guess that also explains why sometimes, when I am simultaneously trying to reflect on the text while scrolling, I am significantly less able to do so fluidly, as if there were some underlying deadlock, and more often than not have to repeatedly attempt finding the next line.. But if you hold a book in your hands, there is much less variation in the 'streamed/online/', structural form of the text. More or less, all that my brain knows it needs to anticipate is page turning. It can figure out how to cancel out my hand movements, background visual information, surroundings, etc. from my conscious experience because that's what we've evolved to be able to suppress from our attention. Maybe, then, computer file viewing UIs that have page-flipping skeuomorphisms are less attention interrupting, because they would avoid these interruptions being done more than one time per page/pair of pages? Link to the mentioned paper: http://www.co.twosides.info/download/To_Scroll_or_Not_to_Scroll_Scrolling_Working_Memory_Capacity_and_Comprehending_Complex_Texts.pdf http://www.co.twosides.info/download/To_Scroll_or_Not_to_Scr...
- mhei 9y ago
  I feel the pagination method demonstrated here is advantageous in that regard, eliminating vertical motion while allowing to see parts of two "pages" at the same time: http://www.magicscroll.net/ http://www.magicscroll.net/ I would love to have that on my ebook reader, may need to hack that together some time to try. I dislike switching back and forth between two pages as is sometimes necessary; in this regard, this even seems better to me than a regular book.
adpirz 9y ago
This doesn't really seem to hold much water. For one, the study was done on college undergrads, a non-randomly selected group who have crossed a certain bar for basic comprehension (looks like the researchers are from the U of Maryland, a major university, so you can expect that the students on average will have well above-average reading comprehension compared to the rest of the world). On top of that, as a former K12 educator, the tools matter far less than the teacher implementing them and the fidelity of execution, very little of which seems to be explored by this study. I don't think digital texts or computers in classrooms are a panacea for what ails our classrooms or that digitizing textbooks is even that exciting when it comes to EdTech -- it's just taking a 19th century tool and digitizing it. This study, however, does not effectively demonstrate that either medium is better than the other, but the Ed world is in desperate need of strong research in that regard, specifically in the efficacy of EdTech in the classroom.
kendallpark 9y ago
> There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. There are also practical considerations. I much prefer physical textbooks but their bulk presents an issue. It's not fun hauling around one tome per class. I remember back in high school my backpack weighed 30+ lbs. Last year I bought a 12.9 iPad pro as a textbook replacement. It works great (still miss the physical paper though). It has also greatly reduced the amount of weight on my shoulders during my bike commute to and from school. Nowadays I only carry my laptop and my tablet in my backpack. Goodnotes can handle huge PDFs and enables me to write on and highlight the text. Voice Dream Reader is a great app to help slog through boring reading (Salli is the best voice I've found so far for scientific lit). I don't use Kindle-like ebooks for textbooks. Similar to what u/acconrad said, I need to be able to write on the text. With all that in mind, my iPad pro is a designated READING device. I have notifications aggressively disabled for pretty much every app. No Facebook social media apps allowed. I won't/can't even log into Facebook on my web browser (someone else manages my password).
- craftyguy 9y ago
  > (someone else manages my password). I'm curious what you mean by this.. someone set your FB password and has to log in for you in order for you to be able to access it? That seems weird. Why?
  - rwc 9y ago
    If you don't have self-control, remove the "self" from the equation?
    - kendallpark 9y ago
      ^^^ this. FB is a huge time sink and I rarely need it for legitimate matters. If I want to use it, my designated password-holder logs me in. I can always go through the reset process if I need it and they are not around. But the hassle of resetting is enough of a deterrent from absentmindedly checking my feed every half-hour.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
ausjke 9y ago
maybe the screen is secondary, on a computer it is way too easy to get distracted especially for young learners comparing to a real paper-format book? our brain might adapt to searching instead of deep-thinking from now on, using all abstracted data sets from big-data-somewhere, which also means, we will lose control and the world will be taken over by AI instead
jansho 9y ago
For me it’s the medium itself. eBooks are ok if they’re short or fiction, but for heavy duty reading, I need a wide spread, and I need to be able to annotate and flick through fast, either to preview or jump to another section. Can’t do all that on a digital device.
Adutude 9y ago
Interesting tidbit, in the sentence in the article " To explore these patterns further, we conducted three studies that explored college students' ability to comprehend information on paper and from screens." "Three studies" is linked to a single study, not three. The study is on the site tandfonline.com (Taylor and Francis), where you have to pay to read the study. Also interesting is that Taylor and Francis, on their website taylorandfrancis.com, says "Taylor & Francis Group publishes books for all levels of academic study and professional development, across a wide range of subjects and disciplines." So long story short, this is a study saying that books are better, that's on a site who's main business is publishing books. Not saying the study is inaccurate, but I find an article, about how books are better, on a book publishers site, somewhat suspect.
- scw 9y ago
  It's in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, written by academics in the field, not by T&F itself, nor funded by them. While there are problems with the peer reviewed system, publisher interference with research results isn't typically one of them.
- Fomite 9y ago
  First, on your notion of bias: Taylor and Francis is owned by informa. A trivial search for informa's annual report would reveal that academic publishing makes up 45.7% of their operating profit, and 50% of that comes from subscriptions, almost all of which are digital. Further, most of their major initiatives are in digital, especially for journals which are most of their revenue. Second, on your "three studies" objection - they're looking at three separate outcomes, as they mention in the article. It's common to lump the results of multiple highly related studies in a single paper. Third, as noted by another commenter, nearly all peer-reviewed journal articles are going to be published by publishers who also have a stake in other aspect of academic publishing.
  - asdh432 9y ago
    I highly doubt Informa is keeping TnF around as a charity cause. They need to keep doing what they do, sell books, to make corporate happy. TnF claim to publish 1,500 new titles each year. Informa isn't just eating that entire cost.
wudangmonk 9y ago
Assuming the discrepancy cannot be solved by simply carrying around a notepad to write with whenever you are reading something you want a deeper understanding of, the digital medium offers many benefits in my opinion that make it better overall. I cannot stand reading on a white background for long periods of time. If I had to deal with a white background I simply would not read as much. Being able to change both font size and type is also useful because publishers do not always make a sane choice for you. Above all, I think price is the best reason. You might be able to get away with charging $100+ dollars for a printed book but you cannot do that with printed books, therefore book prices have to come down. Even if there actually is a loss in comprehension when actively reading and not just passive reading, the overall benefits of reading more whether its because you can now buy more books due to the lower prices or because you can change the color/text to suit your taste has to outweigh the benefits offered by printed books.
newman8r 9y ago
Physical vs digital copies offer different advantages, and for someone who's serious about mastering the material, it probably makes sense to consider having both. For overall comprehension, my feeling is that the advantage of physical books is related to spatial memory, and seems related to "memory palace" techniques for memorization. I can physically recall pages of books I've read many years ago, but I really don't get the same thing from a digital copy. Being able to search within digital copies is a clear advantage. The markup/review software and document management system also makes a huge difference.
notadoc 9y ago
Perhaps because screens have endless distractions whereas textbooks do not. Personally, I prefer to read a paper book any day. It feels infinitely softer on my eyes, and it's just more pleasant of an experience to me for whatever reason.
eradicatethots 9y ago
Ok, suppose this is true, why? It sounds like such nonsense to me, there must be confounders
anderskev 9y ago
As others have mentioned I would assume distractions have something to do with it. Whenever I need to learn a new language for work I always opt for a paper copy of a book, and other than photography books those are the only physical ones I have purchased in the last 10+ years. New frameworks obviously I go with a screen as that material changes pretty rapidly, but just baseline getting started with a language, physical book works best for me.
synicalx 9y ago
I tend to find there's uses for both physical and digital textbooks; - Physicals you can spread out, highlight stuff, visually search much fast when you DON'T know exactly what you're looking for, and you can also re-sell them when you're done. - Digital weighs nothing, is cheaper, you can ctrl-f if you DO know what you're looking for, and often come with tools to bookmark/highlight etc. Ideally if I'm dropping $100+ on a textbook I'd like to get access to both. If I'm going to a class I'll take the digital one, if I'm sat at home doing research/writing/reading then I'll use the physical one. Also I'm incredibly vain when it comes to my bookshelves, I aim to have enough books for an in-home library by the time I retire.
Fomite 9y ago
This doesn't terribly surprise me, from my own experience. I either print academic journal articles or subscribe to the physical issues, because I found I never fully retained things I read on a screen, either desktop or iPad.
- wernercd 9y ago
  Likewise... Personally, I think that the addition of tactile, flipping around, lack of distractions, etc... all the little bits add up to a more "immersive" learning experience from books. It strikes me as an offshoot of an article recently that said that simply having a phone in the same room as a person decreases their ability to focus.
Buldak 9y ago
It's interesting that students thought their comprehension was better when reading from screens, rather than paper, when in fact the opposite was the case. What might explain that mistaken perception?
ktta 9y ago
I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that? Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital books can offer. Once you bring in these advantages, I bet the pedagogical advantages will be enormous. I'd like to see that study, and I bet digital books will blow everything out of the water. There are advantages apart from learning benefits. Errata can be a thing of a past with updatable textbooks. You can search for every single word easily and save time. There's no wear and tear. Students can get away with having textbooks on their phones, avoiding carrying textbooks weighing several pounds. Another huge benefit is accessibility. From large font to audio output, all accessibility features ever possible on a computer are possible with the textbook with minimal effort. The publishing industry is only limiting itself because any innovation on its digital books will mean death of its money maker. It will mean much less production and distribution costs which will put in question its atrocious pricing.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  It doesn't matter if you don't retain anything. Anecdotally at least, I and most people I know absorb information better on the printed paper than on a computer screen. Even when I'm writing code, i'm usually taking notes and drawing diagrams in a notebook. Digital media or a supplement, not a replacement, for traditional dead-tree media.
  - ktta 9y ago
    See this is what I'm saying is a bad comparison. Why compare text on paper to text on a screen? Compare text on a paper to rich interactive content on screen. Say you have a really good screen to write on like the iPad Pro where you have minimal latency, infinite space and colors to work with. Also I think you preferring paper is more out of habit than any real advantage. I know of professors who need real chalk on their hand because paper and pen just don't work for them. It has been a personal battle for me too. I love writing on fresh paper with a select few of my favorite pens. It felt like I was doing something, rather than hit away at a keyboard or a screen. But I've convinced myself of the advantages - instant accessibility anywhere, copies to share easily and backups that last a lifetime.
reificator 9y ago
I didn't see anything about eink screens in that article except a mention that they exist. They claim the cost of scrolling is the issue, which is something that I've not seen on an ereader. Page refreshes are a different animal to scrolling, despite the (potentially) distracting flicker they are deterministic: one press is one page. Scrolling is a more analogue interaction, scrolling by one page requires more focus than pressing a button once.
cloverich 9y ago
> In our academic lives, we have books and articles that we regularly return to. The dog-eared pages of these treasured readings contain lines of text etched with questions or reflections. It's difficult to imagine a similar level of engagement with a digital text. Is it? I read nearly exclusively on my kindle for exactly the opposite reason. I find it much easier to keep highlights and notes, then quickly return to them. And the note taking technology on the kindle is crude. Imagine if it was an _actually_ good experience? If note taking were easier (typing is painful). If the data were free (to be shared with other services). If it were easy to connect with others taking notes on the same topics, at the same time? If clicking on an image of a map made it interactive. There are so many possibilities, most of them untapped. I miss reading things on paper. But if our technology were to improve to half of its potential, I'm not sure I would.
- ilaksh 9y ago
  Have you really tried to research that beyond the Kindle? Look at new products from Google and Microsoft or aimed at the legal market. There are great handwriting notes systems out there.
Amygaz 9y ago
Overall I would take that study very lightly. They basically took a cohort of student that did not have to read anything meaningful until then. In highschool they may have had some text and some work to do on a laptop, but the bulk of it was paper based. They were also trained to highlight sentences instead of taking meaningful notes. Train the next generation to mostly use digital and that small study will become a time capsule, which would incidentally be a better outcome that what it is now, i.e. an attempt to generalize a conclusion based on an oversimplistic experimental setup.
sus_007 9y ago
As a student of Science/Mathematics, I often make the most out of my E-books by writing out the exercises/problems/principles on my notebook and repeating the process (mostly for the Mathematics). I think the flexibility that E-books offer regarding it's digital existence is the pillar of my bias towards eBooks.
speedplane 9y ago
I found these bullet points from the article pretty insightful: > - Reading was significantly faster online than in print. > - Students judged their comprehension as better online than in print. > - Paradoxically, overall comprehension was better for print versus digital reading. So with digital reading, you feel like you've learned more than print, but you've actually learned less. This seems pretty dangerous.
- Mindless2112 9y ago
  > This seems pretty dangerous. It sounds pretty much like the Internet as a whole.
  - pls2halp 9y ago
    On the note of the internet as a whole displaying this, there was a study a while ago which found "searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information." http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000070 http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000070 (I first heard about it through the You Are Not So Smart podcast:https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/11/25/yanss-063-how-search-engines-make-us-feel-smarter-than-we-really-are/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/11/25/yanss-063-how-search...)
hmwhy 9y ago
I was skeptical about the claim in the title of the article to begin with. Point three and four in the article makes me even more uncomfrotable (for reasons that others have explained much better), and the article leaves a lot to be desired. A quick Google Scholar of "difference between screen and print in learning" gave me two results that immediately stand out. The first article[1] (2013, n = 72, 10th grade students, reading comprehension of texts between 1400-2000 words, print vs. PDF on computer screens) that the BI article seems to corroborate. The second article[2] (2013, n = 538, university students, textbooks that are learning material for exams, print vs. digital but device type and format available from the abstract) suggests that there is no statistically significant difference between print and screen. Digging deeper, I found another one[3] article (2015, review/opinion based on existing research), which questions format, design, country and culture amongst other things—some of which have already been questioned in the comments. The first thing that I find disturbing aboutthis article is that I'm not even trained in the field of education and I could find a lot of information in the literature that seems to suggest that the BI article is highgly opinionated and underpowered. The second thing that I find disturbing is that the authors of the paper in question themselves wrote that BI article and make sensational assertions with such confidence that is, in my opinion, obviosuly flawed. It's already hard to forgive a reporter sensationalising research results that are not the whole picture, for the authors themselves to do it seems so casually and carelessly seems to be a step up and is, unfortunately, increasingly popular. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512001127 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512... [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002953 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512... [3] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01207678 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01207678
downer71 9y ago
I believe it. Learning how to operate a machine to control what gets displayed is such a distraction, in and of itself. Endless diversions and digressions, even if the devic has no internet. Procrastination just explodes exponentially.
rmbeard 9y ago
This study does suggest that we are doing web development all wrong and that browser functionality is exacerbating this, instead of scrolling we could be doing something like this: http://www.creativebloq.com/html5/create-page-flip-effect-html5-canvas-8112798 http://www.creativebloq.com/html5/create-page-flip-effect-ht... or using any number of similar solutions in jquery.
- dictum 9y ago
  Hard nope. I don't have any research on this, but ergonomic concerns that apply to e-reader devices doesn't necessarily apply to desktop/laptop browsers. Personally, I find scrolling short-length content much better than having to transition screens. For longer reads, I set my ebook app to paginate. A tacky page flip effect only adds an unwanted distraction.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
I don't know if this really matters when it's horrible vs slightly less horrible... It's like you pay hundreds of dollars for a textbook on a subject that hasn't changed in generations, and it's filled with pictures and diagrams and asides and any other layout doodadery their software can muster, but when you get to the exercises it's a pig's breakfast. I remember my physics textbook in college was almost $200 ($200 twenty years ago!), I'd grind out the answer with a fair degree of confidence, check the key... wrong!? Then after banging my head against it for hours and giving up, the professor would tell us the next day that the book was wrong. Next year, we had differential equations. Smaller book, older book, more words, fewer pictures--clear as a bell! Probably learned more physics in a semester of differential equations than a year of physics. Good books make a difference. Unfortunately, the physics book was the rule rather than the exception.
- novalis78 9y ago
  I collect textbooks as a hobby. It amazes me to no end how the textbooks have changed in the last 120 years. It's especially fascinating to look at math and engineering books from the "Apollo program generation". One thing that sticks out is the huge amount of text that guides the student in building up a deep mental picture and lots of thought-associations in all of these technical books. Somehow after the 60s this approach that is fairly consistent going back a 100 years suddenly is replaced with books that feature a ton of pictures and turn into 'trick and exercise' books until they completely explode with color and small text snippets in the 90s. I have my suspicions that the earlier textual approach might have had its merits. Not sure if anyone has done a comparative study on the effects of organizing text books and their long term effectiveness
thadk 9y ago
Why are we 10 years into Kindle's evolution and the renderer still does not draw pages exactly the same way every time you load the same page (paginating forward vs. paginating backward, at the same font size)? I have to expect that this will reduce spatial-visual memory where people remember what position a figure or text had on a page versus a better renderer (PDF, though impractical on small screens) or a physical book and I'd like to see a study which distinguishes this effect.
dingo_bat 9y ago
I can attest to this. I need big pages that I can lay flat on my desk and scribble on with a pencil. Kindle or an LCD screen just doesn't cut it for academic reading.
manmal 9y ago
My guess is that this is related to spatial memory. A lot of memorizing techniques somehow use space to anchor memories on; eg the old Greeks used to walk down the city’s main street while rehearsing speeches, and anchoring topics spatially onto the buildings. A textbook is not exactly a street you are walking down, but it does have a certain physical place for every topic, and our brain can anchor it there, like „let me see, differential equations are in the last third.. ah there is this other topic, I know that diff equations come right after that“.
- spongeb00b 9y ago
  You've conveyed the exact problem I have with ebooks for any kind of technical reference. I read novels in ebook formats and have no problem with there, but after trying several O'Reilly and other publishers works I just found somehow unable to take in the information I was reading. Quickly scanning through to look something up is just impossible and built-in search functions are just miserable.
  - randomstudent 9y ago
    This is a major problem for me when reading digital material, especially if not on something like a PC. On the comuter I can at least Ctrl+F for the part I'm after.
- js8 9y ago
  I have noticed a similar problem. Our company started to offer information in "wiki" format instead of traditional manuals, but I still prefer manuals and get confused quite quickly on the wiki. I think it's because the hyperlinked nature of the wiki makes it harder to remember where things are.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ionised 9y ago
I'm a software developer and I still find I prefer print over screen, both when engaging in field-specific study or just simply reading for pleasure. Most of the free tutorials I use are found on websites though so that's how I do most of my learning. When it comes to tried and tested texts like Pragmatic Programmer, Effective Java, Web Application Hacker's Handbook etc. I will always buy the hard copy textbook and forego the use of the eBook. I had a Kindle Paper White at one point and while I used it a fair bit when travelling, I still preferred stocking a bookshelf with hard copies for reading at home. Something about the experience of flipping through pages makes the whole process that much smoother for me.
chw9e 9y ago
A big plus that is still kind of yet to be realized is the increase in utility of notes taken on a device. I like to jot notes in the margins of books and papers while I'm reading, but I almost never go back and look at them. Every once in a while I'll end up searching trying to find where I wrote my note, and usually can never find it. Recently I have started using Apple Pencil, Apple's Notes app and iBooks to read and jot down ideas. Apple's Notes app already supports searching for handwritten notes, and I hope that soon iBooks can support searching for handwritten notes in PDFs. These apps combined with Spotlight really increase the value of notes + a collection of books/papers, as it turns your device into kind of a personal database.
thinkMOAR 9y ago
Nothing about not being able to run other apps/multitask with a book? When i read a book, i cannot turn to page 123 to see who is online or get notifications that i received an email. Less distractions, more focused, more effectiveness; doesn't really require a study in my opinion.
d--b 9y ago
It'd be interesting to go into more details: - what if it's e-ink? - what if it's paginantes rather than scrolled? - what if there are multiple screens? - what if it's a very large screen? Etc. There must à factor that matters most than others
- jlengrand 9y ago
  What if there isn't any other app (Whatsapp, Slack, Facebook, ...) running next to it :)
- d__k 9y ago
  It would be interesting to learn if it is a casual dependency or correlation also with respect to these factors
hannob 9y ago
So I wanted to have a look at the studies they did. One would cost me $36 dollar to see, the other $42 for 24 hour access and $102 for 30 days access. tl;dr you don't want me to read your research.
jamesrcole 9y ago
> There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. But there's clearly something important that would be lost with print's demise The argument put forth in the article is fundamentally flawed. They're assuming that "screens" has a fixed meaning, to mean what it's like now. But we're actually at very early stages of reading content off screens, and there's a lot of scope of that experience to change in the future. Better displays, better ways to interact with the content, better ways to annotate the content, better ways to deal with distractions on the device, etc etc. Maybe in the end we'll discover print is definitively better, but we are currently a long way from being able to make that claim.
znpy 9y ago
Yeah, no shit. On one hand you have large screens that emit a huge amount of light, posing a huge strain on eyes. On the other hand you have tiny screens, too tiny to display anything remotely useful, in black and white, and slow to update. Ebooks for learning will not take off completely until we'll have larger, faster, cheaper e-ink displays.
- posterboy 9y ago
  ... or rather until people are desperate enough to take advantage of the interactive medium. A comparison books and thei e-equivalents without taking advantage of the different mediua is actuallyleaving me flabbergasting for the right word.
hackermailman 9y ago
I like print books with a website offering errata, and some minimalist recorded lectures on the material, like Gilbert Strang writing on a blackboard to further give insight to the book's material. Even with pdf-tools in emacs, navigating a PDF is still too much wasted time compared to flipping pages plus I have to stare at a screen for hours. The SICP texinfo copy I read being an exception where it was the only time I preferred the digital copy to print.
cyberpunk0 9y ago
No students learn from visuals, demonstrations, examples, comparisons, interactive content. Shoving a students head into a dry, dense volume of endlessly tasteless and monotonous text is the problem we've always had, screens or not
BatFastard 9y ago
Seems like there is a deeper discussion going on here. Not only Print Vs Digital, but also open educational materials Vs "History of the World version 324". I personally prefer printed materials for extended reading, but it is really just a matter of taste. So if we see a study which says "Printed text books are better", it should really add "For SOME PEOPLE". Give students a choice! Give parents a choice! I recall buying two copies of a 120 dollar book just so my son would not have to lug its 5kg back and forth each day from school. The sheer amount of weight students have to carry is ludicrous. Open educational materials solves so many of these problems.
musashizak 9y ago
Emotion and memory are connected. And emotion is connected with perception and pleausure of senses. All this connections was knows from many centuries in the yoga and meditation practice
ejanus 9y ago
But do we need research or study to confirm this? We are community of lifelong learners so we should know better.
- kremlin 9y ago
  Yes, even if you Intuit something or know it from experience, it's valuable to have thus level of certainty through a carefully conducted study. Convincing someone your intuition is true is a lot harder than pointing to the research

393 points by ALee 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

This is a halfway decent article from Business Insider. I find myself 50/50 on this issue. When I need cutting edge info, or niche info, I typically read it on a screen. When I need offline info, or low power info, or simply a different aesthetic for some reason, I love a nice book. Especially for older info. Surprisingly, discovery of info is pretty boundless and fun at a large University library, because books are sorted by topics. I don't need to endlessly query Google for the most authoritative resources. Personally I really feel we need both sources of info. Both types of print have pros and cons. I don't know if I "perform" better with one type of print though. "Better" is very subjective, and when I was in college in 2010-13, all of my tests were written paragraphs/essays. Totally subjective.

acconrad 9y ago

The fourth reason is that some things can't be measured? That seems suspect. I can think of two seemingly obvious inferences from this study that were not mentioned. 1. Digital devices offer more distractions because unlike a book, you also get a slew of other apps (and the internet) at the touch of a button to distract you. Even if you are iron-willed, an OS update will pop up and break your concentration from time to time, a physical book will never present anything other than what it has already printed for you. 2. Books can be written on. I have a Kindle and I can't imagine reading something like Skiena's Algorithms book on it because the effort to take any kind of useful notes far exceeds that of a physical book. You can write in the margins, comment, highlight, all of which helps solidify your understanding. Kindles and iPads may have those things, but they are likely limited in fashion and not nearly as low of an effort to produce as with a book (unless of course it's rented for the semester and you're prohibited from writing in it).

marak830 9y ago
To expand upon your second point, I use a note 3 primarily: it has a digital oen built in. I almost never use it, as there is no unifed way to make notes in margins etc.
sus_007 9y ago
Most of the devices out there could be equipped with write-on feature should the owner install required app for it. I'm a monthly subscriber to Adobe Creative Cloud and I must say Adobe Acrobat DC is the only reader that you'll ever require. You can do almost anything that is digitally possible using the app. I can even write Javascript over my PDF documents.

ilaksh 9y ago

How big was this study? Did they test how well the students performed when they had to search for information? They say that the students read much faster on the screen. What if they just slow down a bit? The textbook industry is corrupt and will believe or promote anything to try to hold on to profits. Wasting all of that paper and making people lug around a bunch of heavy books is asinine.

pizza 9y ago

The idea that scrolling may be jarring enough to hamper reading fits my experience. When I scroll, it doesn't feel like just my browser has to repaint the whole webpage, but it also feels like my brain has to reconstitute the structure of the page via a kind of inverse-repainting, just so that I can reorient my attention, before I can resume it. In other words, if I - have a (semantic) pointer to, say, the last word on a line - am maintaining just the single last word I read in my short-term memory/register - scroll and then have to look for the line I was just on before I have reoriented myself then it feels like I have to do a kind of mechanistic attention-interrupt/syscall that locks my conscious interpretation of the text's meaning until I have returned to the index of the text that I was just at. I guess that also explains why sometimes, when I am simultaneously trying to reflect on the text while scrolling, I am significantly less able to do so fluidly, as if there were some underlying deadlock, and more often than not have to repeatedly attempt finding the next line.. But if you hold a book in your hands, there is much less variation in the 'streamed/online/', structural form of the text. More or less, all that my brain knows it needs to anticipate is page turning. It can figure out how to cancel out my hand movements, background visual information, surroundings, etc. from my conscious experience because that's what we've evolved to be able to suppress from our attention. Maybe, then, computer file viewing UIs that have page-flipping skeuomorphisms are less attention interrupting, because they would avoid these interruptions being done more than one time per page/pair of pages? Link to the mentioned paper: http://www.co.twosides.info/download/To_Scroll_or_Not_to_Scroll_Scrolling_Working_Memory_Capacity_and_Comprehending_Complex_Texts.pdf http://www.co.twosides.info/download/To_Scroll_or_Not_to_Scr...

mhei 9y ago
I feel the pagination method demonstrated here is advantageous in that regard, eliminating vertical motion while allowing to see parts of two "pages" at the same time: http://www.magicscroll.net/ http://www.magicscroll.net/ I would love to have that on my ebook reader, may need to hack that together some time to try. I dislike switching back and forth between two pages as is sometimes necessary; in this regard, this even seems better to me than a regular book.

adpirz 9y ago

This doesn't really seem to hold much water. For one, the study was done on college undergrads, a non-randomly selected group who have crossed a certain bar for basic comprehension (looks like the researchers are from the U of Maryland, a major university, so you can expect that the students on average will have well above-average reading comprehension compared to the rest of the world). On top of that, as a former K12 educator, the tools matter far less than the teacher implementing them and the fidelity of execution, very little of which seems to be explored by this study. I don't think digital texts or computers in classrooms are a panacea for what ails our classrooms or that digitizing textbooks is even that exciting when it comes to EdTech -- it's just taking a 19th century tool and digitizing it. This study, however, does not effectively demonstrate that either medium is better than the other, but the Ed world is in desperate need of strong research in that regard, specifically in the efficacy of EdTech in the classroom.

kendallpark 9y ago

> There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. There are also practical considerations. I much prefer physical textbooks but their bulk presents an issue. It's not fun hauling around one tome per class. I remember back in high school my backpack weighed 30+ lbs. Last year I bought a 12.9 iPad pro as a textbook replacement. It works great (still miss the physical paper though). It has also greatly reduced the amount of weight on my shoulders during my bike commute to and from school. Nowadays I only carry my laptop and my tablet in my backpack. Goodnotes can handle huge PDFs and enables me to write on and highlight the text. Voice Dream Reader is a great app to help slog through boring reading (Salli is the best voice I've found so far for scientific lit). I don't use Kindle-like ebooks for textbooks. Similar to what u/acconrad said, I need to be able to write on the text. With all that in mind, my iPad pro is a designated READING device. I have notifications aggressively disabled for pretty much every app. No Facebook social media apps allowed. I won't/can't even log into Facebook on my web browser (someone else manages my password).

craftyguy 9y ago
> (someone else manages my password). I'm curious what you mean by this.. someone set your FB password and has to log in for you in order for you to be able to access it? That seems weird. Why?
- rwc 9y ago
  If you don't have self-control, remove the "self" from the equation?
  - kendallpark 9y ago
    ^^^ this. FB is a huge time sink and I rarely need it for legitimate matters. If I want to use it, my designated password-holder logs me in. I can always go through the reset process if I need it and they are not around. But the hassle of resetting is enough of a deterrent from absentmindedly checking my feed every half-hour.
  - craftyguy 9y ago

ausjke 9y ago

maybe the screen is secondary, on a computer it is way too easy to get distracted especially for young learners comparing to a real paper-format book? our brain might adapt to searching instead of deep-thinking from now on, using all abstracted data sets from big-data-somewhere, which also means, we will lose control and the world will be taken over by AI instead

jansho 9y ago

For me it’s the medium itself. eBooks are ok if they’re short or fiction, but for heavy duty reading, I need a wide spread, and I need to be able to annotate and flick through fast, either to preview or jump to another section. Can’t do all that on a digital device.

Adutude 9y ago

Interesting tidbit, in the sentence in the article " To explore these patterns further, we conducted three studies that explored college students' ability to comprehend information on paper and from screens." "Three studies" is linked to a single study, not three. The study is on the site tandfonline.com (Taylor and Francis), where you have to pay to read the study. Also interesting is that Taylor and Francis, on their website taylorandfrancis.com, says "Taylor & Francis Group publishes books for all levels of academic study and professional development, across a wide range of subjects and disciplines." So long story short, this is a study saying that books are better, that's on a site who's main business is publishing books. Not saying the study is inaccurate, but I find an article, about how books are better, on a book publishers site, somewhat suspect.

scw 9y ago
It's in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, written by academics in the field, not by T&F itself, nor funded by them. While there are problems with the peer reviewed system, publisher interference with research results isn't typically one of them.
Fomite 9y ago
First, on your notion of bias: Taylor and Francis is owned by informa. A trivial search for informa's annual report would reveal that academic publishing makes up 45.7% of their operating profit, and 50% of that comes from subscriptions, almost all of which are digital. Further, most of their major initiatives are in digital, especially for journals which are most of their revenue. Second, on your "three studies" objection - they're looking at three separate outcomes, as they mention in the article. It's common to lump the results of multiple highly related studies in a single paper. Third, as noted by another commenter, nearly all peer-reviewed journal articles are going to be published by publishers who also have a stake in other aspect of academic publishing.
- asdh432 9y ago
  I highly doubt Informa is keeping TnF around as a charity cause. They need to keep doing what they do, sell books, to make corporate happy. TnF claim to publish 1,500 new titles each year. Informa isn't just eating that entire cost.

wudangmonk 9y ago

Assuming the discrepancy cannot be solved by simply carrying around a notepad to write with whenever you are reading something you want a deeper understanding of, the digital medium offers many benefits in my opinion that make it better overall. I cannot stand reading on a white background for long periods of time. If I had to deal with a white background I simply would not read as much. Being able to change both font size and type is also useful because publishers do not always make a sane choice for you. Above all, I think price is the best reason. You might be able to get away with charging $100+ dollars for a printed book but you cannot do that with printed books, therefore book prices have to come down. Even if there actually is a loss in comprehension when actively reading and not just passive reading, the overall benefits of reading more whether its because you can now buy more books due to the lower prices or because you can change the color/text to suit your taste has to outweigh the benefits offered by printed books.

newman8r 9y ago

Physical vs digital copies offer different advantages, and for someone who's serious about mastering the material, it probably makes sense to consider having both. For overall comprehension, my feeling is that the advantage of physical books is related to spatial memory, and seems related to "memory palace" techniques for memorization. I can physically recall pages of books I've read many years ago, but I really don't get the same thing from a digital copy. Being able to search within digital copies is a clear advantage. The markup/review software and document management system also makes a huge difference.

notadoc 9y ago

Perhaps because screens have endless distractions whereas textbooks do not. Personally, I prefer to read a paper book any day. It feels infinitely softer on my eyes, and it's just more pleasant of an experience to me for whatever reason.

eradicatethots 9y ago

Ok, suppose this is true, why? It sounds like such nonsense to me, there must be confounders

anderskev 9y ago

As others have mentioned I would assume distractions have something to do with it. Whenever I need to learn a new language for work I always opt for a paper copy of a book, and other than photography books those are the only physical ones I have purchased in the last 10+ years. New frameworks obviously I go with a screen as that material changes pretty rapidly, but just baseline getting started with a language, physical book works best for me.

synicalx 9y ago

I tend to find there's uses for both physical and digital textbooks; - Physicals you can spread out, highlight stuff, visually search much fast when you DON'T know exactly what you're looking for, and you can also re-sell them when you're done. - Digital weighs nothing, is cheaper, you can ctrl-f if you DO know what you're looking for, and often come with tools to bookmark/highlight etc. Ideally if I'm dropping $100+ on a textbook I'd like to get access to both. If I'm going to a class I'll take the digital one, if I'm sat at home doing research/writing/reading then I'll use the physical one. Also I'm incredibly vain when it comes to my bookshelves, I aim to have enough books for an in-home library by the time I retire.

Fomite 9y ago

This doesn't terribly surprise me, from my own experience. I either print academic journal articles or subscribe to the physical issues, because I found I never fully retained things I read on a screen, either desktop or iPad.

wernercd 9y ago
Likewise... Personally, I think that the addition of tactile, flipping around, lack of distractions, etc... all the little bits add up to a more "immersive" learning experience from books. It strikes me as an offshoot of an article recently that said that simply having a phone in the same room as a person decreases their ability to focus.

Buldak 9y ago

It's interesting that students thought their comprehension was better when reading from screens, rather than paper, when in fact the opposite was the case. What might explain that mistaken perception?

ktta 9y ago

I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that? Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital books can offer. Once you bring in these advantages, I bet the pedagogical advantages will be enormous. I'd like to see that study, and I bet digital books will blow everything out of the water. There are advantages apart from learning benefits. Errata can be a thing of a past with updatable textbooks. You can search for every single word easily and save time. There's no wear and tear. Students can get away with having textbooks on their phones, avoiding carrying textbooks weighing several pounds. Another huge benefit is accessibility. From large font to audio output, all accessibility features ever possible on a computer are possible with the textbook with minimal effort. The publishing industry is only limiting itself because any innovation on its digital books will mean death of its money maker. It will mean much less production and distribution costs which will put in question its atrocious pricing.

nerdponx 9y ago
It doesn't matter if you don't retain anything. Anecdotally at least, I and most people I know absorb information better on the printed paper than on a computer screen. Even when I'm writing code, i'm usually taking notes and drawing diagrams in a notebook. Digital media or a supplement, not a replacement, for traditional dead-tree media.
- ktta 9y ago
  See this is what I'm saying is a bad comparison. Why compare text on paper to text on a screen? Compare text on a paper to rich interactive content on screen. Say you have a really good screen to write on like the iPad Pro where you have minimal latency, infinite space and colors to work with. Also I think you preferring paper is more out of habit than any real advantage. I know of professors who need real chalk on their hand because paper and pen just don't work for them. It has been a personal battle for me too. I love writing on fresh paper with a select few of my favorite pens. It felt like I was doing something, rather than hit away at a keyboard or a screen. But I've convinced myself of the advantages - instant accessibility anywhere, copies to share easily and backups that last a lifetime.

reificator 9y ago

I didn't see anything about eink screens in that article except a mention that they exist. They claim the cost of scrolling is the issue, which is something that I've not seen on an ereader. Page refreshes are a different animal to scrolling, despite the (potentially) distracting flicker they are deterministic: one press is one page. Scrolling is a more analogue interaction, scrolling by one page requires more focus than pressing a button once.

cloverich 9y ago

> In our academic lives, we have books and articles that we regularly return to. The dog-eared pages of these treasured readings contain lines of text etched with questions or reflections. It's difficult to imagine a similar level of engagement with a digital text. Is it? I read nearly exclusively on my kindle for exactly the opposite reason. I find it much easier to keep highlights and notes, then quickly return to them. And the note taking technology on the kindle is crude. Imagine if it was an _actually_ good experience? If note taking were easier (typing is painful). If the data were free (to be shared with other services). If it were easy to connect with others taking notes on the same topics, at the same time? If clicking on an image of a map made it interactive. There are so many possibilities, most of them untapped. I miss reading things on paper. But if our technology were to improve to half of its potential, I'm not sure I would.

ilaksh 9y ago
Have you really tried to research that beyond the Kindle? Look at new products from Google and Microsoft or aimed at the legal market. There are great handwriting notes systems out there.

Amygaz 9y ago

Overall I would take that study very lightly. They basically took a cohort of student that did not have to read anything meaningful until then. In highschool they may have had some text and some work to do on a laptop, but the bulk of it was paper based. They were also trained to highlight sentences instead of taking meaningful notes. Train the next generation to mostly use digital and that small study will become a time capsule, which would incidentally be a better outcome that what it is now, i.e. an attempt to generalize a conclusion based on an oversimplistic experimental setup.

sus_007 9y ago

As a student of Science/Mathematics, I often make the most out of my E-books by writing out the exercises/problems/principles on my notebook and repeating the process (mostly for the Mathematics). I think the flexibility that E-books offer regarding it's digital existence is the pillar of my bias towards eBooks.

speedplane 9y ago

I found these bullet points from the article pretty insightful: > - Reading was significantly faster online than in print. > - Students judged their comprehension as better online than in print. > - Paradoxically, overall comprehension was better for print versus digital reading. So with digital reading, you feel like you've learned more than print, but you've actually learned less. This seems pretty dangerous.

Mindless2112 9y ago
> This seems pretty dangerous. It sounds pretty much like the Internet as a whole.
- pls2halp 9y ago
  On the note of the internet as a whole displaying this, there was a study a while ago which found "searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information." http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000070 http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000070 (I first heard about it through the You Are Not So Smart podcast:https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/11/25/yanss-063-how-search-engines-make-us-feel-smarter-than-we-really-are/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/11/25/yanss-063-how-search...)

hmwhy 9y ago

I was skeptical about the claim in the title of the article to begin with. Point three and four in the article makes me even more uncomfrotable (for reasons that others have explained much better), and the article leaves a lot to be desired. A quick Google Scholar of "difference between screen and print in learning" gave me two results that immediately stand out. The first article[1] (2013, n = 72, 10th grade students, reading comprehension of texts between 1400-2000 words, print vs. PDF on computer screens) that the BI article seems to corroborate. The second article[2] (2013, n = 538, university students, textbooks that are learning material for exams, print vs. digital but device type and format available from the abstract) suggests that there is no statistically significant difference between print and screen. Digging deeper, I found another one[3] article (2015, review/opinion based on existing research), which questions format, design, country and culture amongst other things—some of which have already been questioned in the comments. The first thing that I find disturbing aboutthis article is that I'm not even trained in the field of education and I could find a lot of information in the literature that seems to suggest that the BI article is highgly opinionated and underpowered. The second thing that I find disturbing is that the authors of the paper in question themselves wrote that BI article and make sensational assertions with such confidence that is, in my opinion, obviosuly flawed. It's already hard to forgive a reporter sensationalising research results that are not the whole picture, for the authors themselves to do it seems so casually and carelessly seems to be a step up and is, unfortunately, increasingly popular. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512001127 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512... [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002953 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512... [3] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01207678 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01207678

downer71 9y ago

I believe it. Learning how to operate a machine to control what gets displayed is such a distraction, in and of itself. Endless diversions and digressions, even if the devic has no internet. Procrastination just explodes exponentially.

rmbeard 9y ago

This study does suggest that we are doing web development all wrong and that browser functionality is exacerbating this, instead of scrolling we could be doing something like this: http://www.creativebloq.com/html5/create-page-flip-effect-html5-canvas-8112798 http://www.creativebloq.com/html5/create-page-flip-effect-ht... or using any number of similar solutions in jquery.

dictum 9y ago
Hard nope. I don't have any research on this, but ergonomic concerns that apply to e-reader devices doesn't necessarily apply to desktop/laptop browsers. Personally, I find scrolling short-length content much better than having to transition screens. For longer reads, I set my ebook app to paginate. A tacky page flip effect only adds an unwanted distraction.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

I don't know if this really matters when it's horrible vs slightly less horrible... It's like you pay hundreds of dollars for a textbook on a subject that hasn't changed in generations, and it's filled with pictures and diagrams and asides and any other layout doodadery their software can muster, but when you get to the exercises it's a pig's breakfast. I remember my physics textbook in college was almost $200 ($200 twenty years ago!), I'd grind out the answer with a fair degree of confidence, check the key... wrong!? Then after banging my head against it for hours and giving up, the professor would tell us the next day that the book was wrong. Next year, we had differential equations. Smaller book, older book, more words, fewer pictures--clear as a bell! Probably learned more physics in a semester of differential equations than a year of physics. Good books make a difference. Unfortunately, the physics book was the rule rather than the exception.

novalis78 9y ago
I collect textbooks as a hobby. It amazes me to no end how the textbooks have changed in the last 120 years. It's especially fascinating to look at math and engineering books from the "Apollo program generation". One thing that sticks out is the huge amount of text that guides the student in building up a deep mental picture and lots of thought-associations in all of these technical books. Somehow after the 60s this approach that is fairly consistent going back a 100 years suddenly is replaced with books that feature a ton of pictures and turn into 'trick and exercise' books until they completely explode with color and small text snippets in the 90s. I have my suspicions that the earlier textual approach might have had its merits. Not sure if anyone has done a comparative study on the effects of organizing text books and their long term effectiveness

thadk 9y ago

Why are we 10 years into Kindle's evolution and the renderer still does not draw pages exactly the same way every time you load the same page (paginating forward vs. paginating backward, at the same font size)? I have to expect that this will reduce spatial-visual memory where people remember what position a figure or text had on a page versus a better renderer (PDF, though impractical on small screens) or a physical book and I'd like to see a study which distinguishes this effect.

dingo_bat 9y ago

I can attest to this. I need big pages that I can lay flat on my desk and scribble on with a pencil. Kindle or an LCD screen just doesn't cut it for academic reading.

manmal 9y ago

My guess is that this is related to spatial memory. A lot of memorizing techniques somehow use space to anchor memories on; eg the old Greeks used to walk down the city’s main street while rehearsing speeches, and anchoring topics spatially onto the buildings. A textbook is not exactly a street you are walking down, but it does have a certain physical place for every topic, and our brain can anchor it there, like „let me see, differential equations are in the last third.. ah there is this other topic, I know that diff equations come right after that“.

spongeb00b 9y ago
You've conveyed the exact problem I have with ebooks for any kind of technical reference. I read novels in ebook formats and have no problem with there, but after trying several O'Reilly and other publishers works I just found somehow unable to take in the information I was reading. Quickly scanning through to look something up is just impossible and built-in search functions are just miserable.
- randomstudent 9y ago
  This is a major problem for me when reading digital material, especially if not on something like a PC. On the comuter I can at least Ctrl+F for the part I'm after.
js8 9y ago
I have noticed a similar problem. Our company started to offer information in "wiki" format instead of traditional manuals, but I still prefer manuals and get confused quite quickly on the wiki. I think it's because the hyperlinked nature of the wiki makes it harder to remember where things are.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ionised 9y ago

I'm a software developer and I still find I prefer print over screen, both when engaging in field-specific study or just simply reading for pleasure. Most of the free tutorials I use are found on websites though so that's how I do most of my learning. When it comes to tried and tested texts like Pragmatic Programmer, Effective Java, Web Application Hacker's Handbook etc. I will always buy the hard copy textbook and forego the use of the eBook. I had a Kindle Paper White at one point and while I used it a fair bit when travelling, I still preferred stocking a bookshelf with hard copies for reading at home. Something about the experience of flipping through pages makes the whole process that much smoother for me.

chw9e 9y ago

A big plus that is still kind of yet to be realized is the increase in utility of notes taken on a device. I like to jot notes in the margins of books and papers while I'm reading, but I almost never go back and look at them. Every once in a while I'll end up searching trying to find where I wrote my note, and usually can never find it. Recently I have started using Apple Pencil, Apple's Notes app and iBooks to read and jot down ideas. Apple's Notes app already supports searching for handwritten notes, and I hope that soon iBooks can support searching for handwritten notes in PDFs. These apps combined with Spotlight really increase the value of notes + a collection of books/papers, as it turns your device into kind of a personal database.

thinkMOAR 9y ago

Nothing about not being able to run other apps/multitask with a book? When i read a book, i cannot turn to page 123 to see who is online or get notifications that i received an email. Less distractions, more focused, more effectiveness; doesn't really require a study in my opinion.

d--b 9y ago

It'd be interesting to go into more details: - what if it's e-ink? - what if it's paginantes rather than scrolled? - what if there are multiple screens? - what if it's a very large screen? Etc. There must à factor that matters most than others

jlengrand 9y ago
What if there isn't any other app (Whatsapp, Slack, Facebook, ...) running next to it :)
d__k 9y ago
It would be interesting to learn if it is a casual dependency or correlation also with respect to these factors

hannob 9y ago

So I wanted to have a look at the studies they did. One would cost me $36 dollar to see, the other $42 for 24 hour access and $102 for 30 days access. tl;dr you don't want me to read your research.

jamesrcole 9y ago

> There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. But there's clearly something important that would be lost with print's demise The argument put forth in the article is fundamentally flawed. They're assuming that "screens" has a fixed meaning, to mean what it's like now. But we're actually at very early stages of reading content off screens, and there's a lot of scope of that experience to change in the future. Better displays, better ways to interact with the content, better ways to annotate the content, better ways to deal with distractions on the device, etc etc. Maybe in the end we'll discover print is definitively better, but we are currently a long way from being able to make that claim.

znpy 9y ago

Yeah, no shit. On one hand you have large screens that emit a huge amount of light, posing a huge strain on eyes. On the other hand you have tiny screens, too tiny to display anything remotely useful, in black and white, and slow to update. Ebooks for learning will not take off completely until we'll have larger, faster, cheaper e-ink displays.

posterboy 9y ago
... or rather until people are desperate enough to take advantage of the interactive medium. A comparison books and thei e-equivalents without taking advantage of the different mediua is actuallyleaving me flabbergasting for the right word.

hackermailman 9y ago

I like print books with a website offering errata, and some minimalist recorded lectures on the material, like Gilbert Strang writing on a blackboard to further give insight to the book's material. Even with pdf-tools in emacs, navigating a PDF is still too much wasted time compared to flipping pages plus I have to stare at a screen for hours. The SICP texinfo copy I read being an exception where it was the only time I preferred the digital copy to print.

cyberpunk0 9y ago

No students learn from visuals, demonstrations, examples, comparisons, interactive content. Shoving a students head into a dry, dense volume of endlessly tasteless and monotonous text is the problem we've always had, screens or not

BatFastard 9y ago

Seems like there is a deeper discussion going on here. Not only Print Vs Digital, but also open educational materials Vs "History of the World version 324". I personally prefer printed materials for extended reading, but it is really just a matter of taste. So if we see a study which says "Printed text books are better", it should really add "For SOME PEOPLE". Give students a choice! Give parents a choice! I recall buying two copies of a 120 dollar book just so my son would not have to lug its 5kg back and forth each day from school. The sheer amount of weight students have to carry is ludicrous. Open educational materials solves so many of these problems.

musashizak 9y ago

Emotion and memory are connected. And emotion is connected with perception and pleausure of senses. All this connections was knows from many centuries in the yoga and meditation practice

ejanus 9y ago

But do we need research or study to confirm this? We are community of lifelong learners so we should know better.

kremlin 9y ago
Yes, even if you Intuit something or know it from experience, it's valuable to have thus level of certainty through a carefully conducted study. Convincing someone your intuition is true is a lot harder than pointing to the research