8 ms·

Reading Literature on Screen: A Price for Convenience?

90 points by paublyrne 12y ago

3rd3 12y ago
Here is my N=1 armchair hypothesis: If there really is a difference, I could imagine that the limited tactile experience is the key factor. Often times when I go for a walk with a podcast on I remember it much better because I associate parts of it with things I encountered along the way. Our finger tips are like magnifying glasses and produce a very rich (though semi-semiconscious) experience we associate parts of the book’s content with (especially the thinkness of both sides). With ebooks it’s reduced to visual experience, the tactile experience is pretty limited in variation and overall unchanging.
- dethstar 12y ago
  Well, I know(but don't have sources as of now) it works like that for memorizing stuff, as an example you probably remember where hundreds (or even thousands) of objects are placed within your home, or your office without thinking twice about it, you just "draw" a path to that you were looking for. But is the absorbing in the article about remembering or understanding what's being read?
- parfe 12y ago
  Your hypothesis is literally the article. "When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right," said Mangen. "You have the tactile sense of progress, in addition to the visual ... [The differences for Kindle readers] might have something to do with the fact that the fixity of a text on paper, and this very gradual unfolding of paper as you progress through a story, is some kind of sensory offload, supporting the visual sense of progress when you're reading. Perhaps this somehow aids the reader, providing more fixity and solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and progress of the text, and hence the story." You could have at least glanced at the link before commenting.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    I'd really like to know if they had that hypothesis going in and were testing it, or if they ran the test and then put in a plausible-sounding explanation for the results they found.
  - medell 12y ago
    This comment really confused me as I couldn't find the quote in the NYT until I read the other comments that the link had been changed from The Guardian. Nevertheless, this seems plausible.
  - 3rd3 12y ago
    Everybody is welcome to reinterpret my comment as a summary then.
anigbrowl 12y ago
There was another article posted here about this the other day, with more detailed information than this one (not much discussion though): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8186517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8186517
- godarderik 12y ago
  I made the other submission and it's actually the exact same article, there is just a small difference in the URL. Interesting to see how this took off when the other one did not.
trustfundbaby 12y ago
The title is misleading ... this is what the real finding is "But instead, the performance was largely similar, except when it came to the timing of events in the story. "The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure, ie, when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order." The NY Times article about it is much better and includes actual number (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/arts/reading-literature-on-screen-a-price-for-convenience.html?referrer http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/arts/reading-literature...)
- dang 12y ago
  Ok, we changed the url to there from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-less-kindles-paper-study-plot-ereader-digitisation http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-....
gprasanth 12y ago
I totally agree with this. This is a problem I've faced and recognized it myself. I also feel very similar when it comes to writing. Writing on a computer just never works for me. Plain old paper and pen always get me going. I feel it's just easy to focus our vivid imaginative powers when we don't have some thing we use day to day to do things other than read. I mean would you be able to read if a story was written in an accounting book? Between those lines?
vizzah 12y ago
Maybe because content on Kindles consumed on the run / when commuting, during short coffee breaks.. while paper book somehow attracts the reader when he knows he's able to dedicate more time for getting deeper in those pages..
thinkling 12y ago
Note: > "the performance [of paper vs e-reader] was largely similar, except when it came to the timing of events in the story." Without seeing the paper, we don't know what measures were investigated and on how many points the e-reader experience was as effective as the paper experience. This article seems to be picking out one metric where there was a difference, but we don't know how large the absolute value of the difference is. Sure would be nice to be able to read the paper and comment on the actual work. [EDIT: this comment was in response to the original link to the Guardian article, since changed to link to a better NYT article.]
mattsfrey 12y ago
I can imagine the act of holding the book and thumbing through the pages as you go along might help embed the timing of things into your subconscious, as it's quite obvious exactly where you are in a book due to how you are holding it, where as on tablet its more of just a continuous stream on a screen.
- lozf 12y ago
  Definitely. The subtle but ever present tactile reminder of how much book is left to be read also helps build anticipation as the end approaches with certain works. It's like the metadata is being delivered kinesthetically, without distracting from the simultaneous visual delivery of the message itself. Page numbers and percentage read indicators just can't compete.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > I can imagine the act of holding the book and thumbing through the pages as you go along might help embed the timing of things into your subconscious I wonder what someone who spent their life reading only on tablets would say when first reading a book? (I agree with you, but like you and everyone here I spent most of my life reading books.)
drcode 12y ago
Whether this is true or not, I find my own comprehension/recall much much higher when longform text is read to me than when I read it. Consequently, I currently get all my books either in audiobook form, or if not possible I use my smart phone to read the ebook to me. (With the exception of highly technical books with lots of formulas.) There is still a bit of a taboo in our society I think to not read books manually, hopefully this will pass- It's much more important what you read, not how you read it.
paublyrne 12y ago
The first thing I used to do with a new book was smell the paper. I find having that constant smell near me as I read a book makes the experience somehow more visceral. To be honest, I still remember how the paper in my primary school maths books smelled, and I remember how the pages felt (shiny). Thankfully I also still remember some of the contents.
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  They make "book smell" scented candles.
gatehouse 12y ago
I real incessantly with Kindle on an iPhone 5S ... so this is really relevant for me. Thoughts: 1. The worse temporal understanding could be a problem for history and bio books especially. I find myself making a quick diversion to Wikipedia quite often for additional context and information. For non-fiction you can quite easily pull up timelines etc. if you're having trouble remembering. For some reason on the iPhone I can do a quick web search without getting distracted, which is a problem for me if I try to read on my laptop. 2. Interesting to know the "reading history" of the participants. I've been reading paper books since I was quite young, I couldn't be any more comfortable with the medium. I only got comfortable with eBooks after powering through the entire ASOIAF (i.e. Game of Thrones) series on a phone screen. I find that after being acclimatized it is much easier to fully focus on the material. 3. Using the dedicated hardware (Kindle DXes) was probably quite helpful to the performance of that group. It is important that page turns etc. are fast and there is no resistance of any kind to movement through the book. I might quite naturally take short breaks during reading but having them imposed on me or any other kind of focus break would be intolerable.
DubiousPusher 12y ago
More evidence that if you look at data enough different ways you're bound to discover an outlier and call it a significant finding.
cwyers 12y ago
Oh geez. From the New York Times article: "In most respects, there was no significant difference between the Kindle readers and the paper readers: the emotional measures were roughly the same, and both groups of readers responded almost equally to questions dealing with the setting of the story, the characters and other plot details. But, the Kindle readers scored significantly lower on questions about when events in the story occurred. They also performed almost twice as poorly when asked to arrange 14 plot points in the correct sequence." So, using a battery of test questions divided into five subjects, INCLUDING TIME AND EVENTS, there was no significant difference between the two groups. But on an entirely different test methodology, the Kindle readers scored significantly worse than the paper readers on plot orders. So they go, "Well, we have a battery of results that shows no difference, and one result that shows a difference. Let's backfit an explanation to the one interesting result!" It's that XKCD strip about jelly beans.
- yasth 12y ago
  It's that XKCD strip about jelly beans. ( http://www.xkcd.com/882/ http://www.xkcd.com/882/ )
- tzs 12y ago
  > So, using a battery of test questions divided into five subjects, INCLUDING TIME AND EVENTS, there was no significant difference between the two groups It says right in the part you quoted that the Kindle readers scored significantly lower on the event time questions. They also did poorly on the separate plot ordering test. I fail to see any problem with this, since I would expect the to be good correlation between how well people do on questions about event timing in the story and how well they can order a timeline of the plot.
  - sixbrx 12y ago
    I think parent is pointing out that there could be a problem of "mutliple testing" in the statistics used. If you do enough tests for statistical significance, and do not correct for multiple testing, then some fraction (your cutoff, typically .05) will be expected to test positive even when nothing is happening (null hypothesis holds).
facepalm 12y ago
While I don't care about this time ordering stuff (never noticed anything is missing from my enjoyment, thank you very much), who says ebooks couldn't help with that? It would be easy to include all sorts of fancy progress trackers. And not only progression of time. I sometimes have trouble following all the characters in complex novels. ebooks could provide handy help pages visualizing the entanglement of the actors as the story progresses. And who knows what more. I suppose current readers are not really equipped for it, but the next generation might be. I see no technical reason not to have that kind of stuff.
u124556 12y ago
> timing of events in the story Maybe because with the paper one you can associate how far you are along with the pages turned?
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  So perhaps an ereader with an edge used for advancing through the content that shrinks in depth as you approach the end?
semiel 12y ago
These are some really interesting results. As someone who has almost completely converted to digital books, I would be really interested to see these results used to inspire better UI design on the part of people like Kindle. I mostly use the Kindle Android app, and it's getting better and better, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  I wish the ereader "screensaver" would be the last page read.
breadbox 12y ago
I'd like to also see a comparison with reading vs audiobook, (and maybe vs being read to by a live person). That would also help address their hypothesis about the feedback of the book pages.
- RV86 12y ago
  Agreed -- my own personal experience with this sort of phenomenon is via chess. I am a much stronger player over the board than I am online and I think the visual representation/spatial relationship is a large part of it. I just engage in a different way. While different visual representations may seem equivalent on some level, the way our brains process them may be very, very different. I would imagine many of us also experience a similar phenomenon via writing by hand vs. typing. I am suddenly inspired to write our head UX guy a letter.
  - zokier 12y ago
    Have you tried playing online chess with physical board, replicating the moves? If your hypothesis is correct then that should boost your performance.
    - RV86 12y ago
      I have not, but I will!
nickkthequick 12y ago
One study with a grand total of 50 subjects and we're already saying that readers absorb less on Kindles? While interesting, the headline is click-bait and is not something we can say without further study.
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  FWIW I've personally had the same experience. I realize that that's not really a proof of anything.
- zavulon 12y ago
  50 subjects and 1 short story
- parfe 12y ago
  Do you take issue with the statistics of the study? Or do you just feel 50 seems like a small number in your gut?
  - cwyers 12y ago
    The Guardian article linked actually doesn't present the statistics of the study, which hasn't been published yet. Absent further information, critiquing the sample size sounds pretty reasonable to me.
    - nerfhammer 12y ago
      You can't criticize the sample size without knowing the effect size
      - cwyers 12y ago
        Withholding evidence isn't a defense against criticism. If you won't TELL ME your effect size, but you do tell me the sample size, I can certainly say, "I am skeptical of your conclusion, because of your sample size."
thathonkey 12y ago
I wouldn't have expected this result necessarily but it is interesting how with eReaders, you completely lose that spatial memory that you get from reading traditional paper bound books. I bet you could approximate where a passage you remember is without knowing the page # after reading a traditional book. Of course, eReaders have the advantage of being able to search for text so finding passages isn't really a problem.
- thirdtruck 12y ago
  I would love it if eBooks supported custom, programmable side-bars, one where the layout designer could add a "map" of the book that was more unique and memorable than the percentage tracker of, e.g. the eInk Kindle.
  - zokier 12y ago
    A significant strength of Kindle is its distraction-free nature. While a progress-bar might be good, I don't think anything more complex than simple line would be suitable. Also its natural place would imho be the bottom edge.
    - dmd 12y ago
      The kindle already has this.
      - majormajor 12y ago
        The Kindle had one. One of the things I miss from upgrading from a Kindle Keyboard to a 2013 Paperwhite, where I can't figure out any way to get the bottom progressbar back.
        zokier 12y ago
        Thank you. I thought I was missing something because I have Kindle (paperwhite) in front of me, and it certainly doesn't have any progress bars.
taeric 12y ago
I don't buy it, right off. Seems just as likely as people that read more recall less. Especially at the levels that people read more when they get an ebook. More likely, actually, is people that are used to reading paper books don't read as well in a new format. Also consider, many more people are reading "mystery" novels than did in the past. I know I would likely have never picked up a mystery myself, yet I have picked up a few on digital sales.
- MattBearman 12y ago
  This seems likely, since getting a kindle I probably read at least 10 time more books than the analogue days.
  - gretful 12y ago
    ditto for me too. I read multiple books a week now, versus only what I could carry home from the library, or buy at the bookstore.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > Also consider, many more people are reading "mystery" novels than did in the past. How are you defining "many more people" here? Raw numbers? Or the proportion of mystery book buying readers?
  - taeric 12y ago
    Sadly, I don't have hard numbers here. Just going with sources such as this[1]. Basically, the fiction market is growing by about 40% currently. To my (admittedly layman) eyes, that is pretty impressive growth. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/media/e-book-sales-a-boon-to-publishers-in-2012.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/media/e-book-sale...
- deleted 12y ago
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graeme 12y ago
It would be interesting to see a study that compared reading performance on larger books. I just finished the Idiot, by Dostoyevsky. It was challenging; I frequently flipped back to earlier passages to clarify details. It was easy to find passages. When I read paperback I have some kind of tactile memory for where details are. I don't necessarily remember words, so I couldn't search. But I can find any passage in 2-10 seconds. I can't do that electronically.
jvandonsel 12y ago
Even if the participants had "equivalent reading habits and experience with tablets", just imagine if you were presented with a device as unusual as a Kindle DX. I would be distracted for many minutes. "Ooh, shiny! What does this button do?"

90 points by paublyrne 12y ago

3rd3 12y ago

Here is my N=1 armchair hypothesis: If there really is a difference, I could imagine that the limited tactile experience is the key factor. Often times when I go for a walk with a podcast on I remember it much better because I associate parts of it with things I encountered along the way. Our finger tips are like magnifying glasses and produce a very rich (though semi-semiconscious) experience we associate parts of the book’s content with (especially the thinkness of both sides). With ebooks it’s reduced to visual experience, the tactile experience is pretty limited in variation and overall unchanging.

dethstar 12y ago
Well, I know(but don't have sources as of now) it works like that for memorizing stuff, as an example you probably remember where hundreds (or even thousands) of objects are placed within your home, or your office without thinking twice about it, you just "draw" a path to that you were looking for. But is the absorbing in the article about remembering or understanding what's being read?
parfe 12y ago
Your hypothesis is literally the article. "When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right," said Mangen. "You have the tactile sense of progress, in addition to the visual ... [The differences for Kindle readers] might have something to do with the fact that the fixity of a text on paper, and this very gradual unfolding of paper as you progress through a story, is some kind of sensory offload, supporting the visual sense of progress when you're reading. Perhaps this somehow aids the reader, providing more fixity and solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and progress of the text, and hence the story." You could have at least glanced at the link before commenting.
- cwyers 12y ago
  I'd really like to know if they had that hypothesis going in and were testing it, or if they ran the test and then put in a plausible-sounding explanation for the results they found.
- medell 12y ago
  This comment really confused me as I couldn't find the quote in the NYT until I read the other comments that the link had been changed from The Guardian. Nevertheless, this seems plausible.
- 3rd3 12y ago
  Everybody is welcome to reinterpret my comment as a summary then.

anigbrowl 12y ago

There was another article posted here about this the other day, with more detailed information than this one (not much discussion though): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8186517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8186517

godarderik 12y ago
I made the other submission and it's actually the exact same article, there is just a small difference in the URL. Interesting to see how this took off when the other one did not.

trustfundbaby 12y ago

The title is misleading ... this is what the real finding is "But instead, the performance was largely similar, except when it came to the timing of events in the story. "The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure, ie, when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order." The NY Times article about it is much better and includes actual number (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/arts/reading-literature-on-screen-a-price-for-convenience.html?referrer http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/arts/reading-literature...)

dang 12y ago
Ok, we changed the url to there from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-less-kindles-paper-study-plot-ereader-digitisation http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-....

gprasanth 12y ago

I totally agree with this. This is a problem I've faced and recognized it myself. I also feel very similar when it comes to writing. Writing on a computer just never works for me. Plain old paper and pen always get me going. I feel it's just easy to focus our vivid imaginative powers when we don't have some thing we use day to day to do things other than read. I mean would you be able to read if a story was written in an accounting book? Between those lines?

vizzah 12y ago

Maybe because content on Kindles consumed on the run / when commuting, during short coffee breaks.. while paper book somehow attracts the reader when he knows he's able to dedicate more time for getting deeper in those pages..

thinkling 12y ago

Note: > "the performance [of paper vs e-reader] was largely similar, except when it came to the timing of events in the story." Without seeing the paper, we don't know what measures were investigated and on how many points the e-reader experience was as effective as the paper experience. This article seems to be picking out one metric where there was a difference, but we don't know how large the absolute value of the difference is. Sure would be nice to be able to read the paper and comment on the actual work. [EDIT: this comment was in response to the original link to the Guardian article, since changed to link to a better NYT article.]

mattsfrey 12y ago

I can imagine the act of holding the book and thumbing through the pages as you go along might help embed the timing of things into your subconscious, as it's quite obvious exactly where you are in a book due to how you are holding it, where as on tablet its more of just a continuous stream on a screen.

lozf 12y ago
Definitely. The subtle but ever present tactile reminder of how much book is left to be read also helps build anticipation as the end approaches with certain works. It's like the metadata is being delivered kinesthetically, without distracting from the simultaneous visual delivery of the message itself. Page numbers and percentage read indicators just can't compete.
hackuser 12y ago
> I can imagine the act of holding the book and thumbing through the pages as you go along might help embed the timing of things into your subconscious I wonder what someone who spent their life reading only on tablets would say when first reading a book? (I agree with you, but like you and everyone here I spent most of my life reading books.)

drcode 12y ago

Whether this is true or not, I find my own comprehension/recall much much higher when longform text is read to me than when I read it. Consequently, I currently get all my books either in audiobook form, or if not possible I use my smart phone to read the ebook to me. (With the exception of highly technical books with lots of formulas.) There is still a bit of a taboo in our society I think to not read books manually, hopefully this will pass- It's much more important what you read, not how you read it.

paublyrne 12y ago

The first thing I used to do with a new book was smell the paper. I find having that constant smell near me as I read a book makes the experience somehow more visceral. To be honest, I still remember how the paper in my primary school maths books smelled, and I remember how the pages felt (shiny). Thankfully I also still remember some of the contents.

Turing_Machine 12y ago
They make "book smell" scented candles.

gatehouse 12y ago

I real incessantly with Kindle on an iPhone 5S ... so this is really relevant for me. Thoughts: 1. The worse temporal understanding could be a problem for history and bio books especially. I find myself making a quick diversion to Wikipedia quite often for additional context and information. For non-fiction you can quite easily pull up timelines etc. if you're having trouble remembering. For some reason on the iPhone I can do a quick web search without getting distracted, which is a problem for me if I try to read on my laptop. 2. Interesting to know the "reading history" of the participants. I've been reading paper books since I was quite young, I couldn't be any more comfortable with the medium. I only got comfortable with eBooks after powering through the entire ASOIAF (i.e. Game of Thrones) series on a phone screen. I find that after being acclimatized it is much easier to fully focus on the material. 3. Using the dedicated hardware (Kindle DXes) was probably quite helpful to the performance of that group. It is important that page turns etc. are fast and there is no resistance of any kind to movement through the book. I might quite naturally take short breaks during reading but having them imposed on me or any other kind of focus break would be intolerable.

DubiousPusher 12y ago

More evidence that if you look at data enough different ways you're bound to discover an outlier and call it a significant finding.

cwyers 12y ago

Oh geez. From the New York Times article: "In most respects, there was no significant difference between the Kindle readers and the paper readers: the emotional measures were roughly the same, and both groups of readers responded almost equally to questions dealing with the setting of the story, the characters and other plot details. But, the Kindle readers scored significantly lower on questions about when events in the story occurred. They also performed almost twice as poorly when asked to arrange 14 plot points in the correct sequence." So, using a battery of test questions divided into five subjects, INCLUDING TIME AND EVENTS, there was no significant difference between the two groups. But on an entirely different test methodology, the Kindle readers scored significantly worse than the paper readers on plot orders. So they go, "Well, we have a battery of results that shows no difference, and one result that shows a difference. Let's backfit an explanation to the one interesting result!" It's that XKCD strip about jelly beans.

yasth 12y ago
It's that XKCD strip about jelly beans. ( http://www.xkcd.com/882/ http://www.xkcd.com/882/ )
tzs 12y ago
> So, using a battery of test questions divided into five subjects, INCLUDING TIME AND EVENTS, there was no significant difference between the two groups It says right in the part you quoted that the Kindle readers scored significantly lower on the event time questions. They also did poorly on the separate plot ordering test. I fail to see any problem with this, since I would expect the to be good correlation between how well people do on questions about event timing in the story and how well they can order a timeline of the plot.
- sixbrx 12y ago
  I think parent is pointing out that there could be a problem of "mutliple testing" in the statistics used. If you do enough tests for statistical significance, and do not correct for multiple testing, then some fraction (your cutoff, typically .05) will be expected to test positive even when nothing is happening (null hypothesis holds).

facepalm 12y ago

While I don't care about this time ordering stuff (never noticed anything is missing from my enjoyment, thank you very much), who says ebooks couldn't help with that? It would be easy to include all sorts of fancy progress trackers. And not only progression of time. I sometimes have trouble following all the characters in complex novels. ebooks could provide handy help pages visualizing the entanglement of the actors as the story progresses. And who knows what more. I suppose current readers are not really equipped for it, but the next generation might be. I see no technical reason not to have that kind of stuff.

u124556 12y ago

> timing of events in the story Maybe because with the paper one you can associate how far you are along with the pages turned?

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
So perhaps an ereader with an edge used for advancing through the content that shrinks in depth as you approach the end?

semiel 12y ago

These are some really interesting results. As someone who has almost completely converted to digital books, I would be really interested to see these results used to inspire better UI design on the part of people like Kindle. I mostly use the Kindle Android app, and it's getting better and better, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

WalterBright 12y ago
I wish the ereader "screensaver" would be the last page read.

breadbox 12y ago

I'd like to also see a comparison with reading vs audiobook, (and maybe vs being read to by a live person). That would also help address their hypothesis about the feedback of the book pages.

RV86 12y ago
Agreed -- my own personal experience with this sort of phenomenon is via chess. I am a much stronger player over the board than I am online and I think the visual representation/spatial relationship is a large part of it. I just engage in a different way. While different visual representations may seem equivalent on some level, the way our brains process them may be very, very different. I would imagine many of us also experience a similar phenomenon via writing by hand vs. typing. I am suddenly inspired to write our head UX guy a letter.
- zokier 12y ago
  Have you tried playing online chess with physical board, replicating the moves? If your hypothesis is correct then that should boost your performance.
  - RV86 12y ago
    I have not, but I will!

nickkthequick 12y ago

One study with a grand total of 50 subjects and we're already saying that readers absorb less on Kindles? While interesting, the headline is click-bait and is not something we can say without further study.

adamnemecek 12y ago
FWIW I've personally had the same experience. I realize that that's not really a proof of anything.
zavulon 12y ago
50 subjects and 1 short story
parfe 12y ago
Do you take issue with the statistics of the study? Or do you just feel 50 seems like a small number in your gut?
- cwyers 12y ago
  The Guardian article linked actually doesn't present the statistics of the study, which hasn't been published yet. Absent further information, critiquing the sample size sounds pretty reasonable to me.
  - nerfhammer 12y ago
    You can't criticize the sample size without knowing the effect size
    - cwyers 12y ago
      Withholding evidence isn't a defense against criticism. If you won't TELL ME your effect size, but you do tell me the sample size, I can certainly say, "I am skeptical of your conclusion, because of your sample size."

thathonkey 12y ago

I wouldn't have expected this result necessarily but it is interesting how with eReaders, you completely lose that spatial memory that you get from reading traditional paper bound books. I bet you could approximate where a passage you remember is without knowing the page # after reading a traditional book. Of course, eReaders have the advantage of being able to search for text so finding passages isn't really a problem.

thirdtruck 12y ago
I would love it if eBooks supported custom, programmable side-bars, one where the layout designer could add a "map" of the book that was more unique and memorable than the percentage tracker of, e.g. the eInk Kindle.
- zokier 12y ago
  A significant strength of Kindle is its distraction-free nature. While a progress-bar might be good, I don't think anything more complex than simple line would be suitable. Also its natural place would imho be the bottom edge.
  - dmd 12y ago
    The kindle already has this.
    - majormajor 12y ago
      The Kindle had one. One of the things I miss from upgrading from a Kindle Keyboard to a 2013 Paperwhite, where I can't figure out any way to get the bottom progressbar back.
      - zokier 12y ago
        Thank you. I thought I was missing something because I have Kindle (paperwhite) in front of me, and it certainly doesn't have any progress bars.

taeric 12y ago

I don't buy it, right off. Seems just as likely as people that read more recall less. Especially at the levels that people read more when they get an ebook. More likely, actually, is people that are used to reading paper books don't read as well in a new format. Also consider, many more people are reading "mystery" novels than did in the past. I know I would likely have never picked up a mystery myself, yet I have picked up a few on digital sales.

MattBearman 12y ago
This seems likely, since getting a kindle I probably read at least 10 time more books than the analogue days.
- gretful 12y ago
  ditto for me too. I read multiple books a week now, versus only what I could carry home from the library, or buy at the bookstore.
DanBC 12y ago
> Also consider, many more people are reading "mystery" novels than did in the past. How are you defining "many more people" here? Raw numbers? Or the proportion of mystery book buying readers?
- taeric 12y ago
  Sadly, I don't have hard numbers here. Just going with sources such as this[1]. Basically, the fiction market is growing by about 40% currently. To my (admittedly layman) eyes, that is pretty impressive growth. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/media/e-book-sales-a-boon-to-publishers-in-2012.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/media/e-book-sale...
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graeme 12y ago

It would be interesting to see a study that compared reading performance on larger books. I just finished the Idiot, by Dostoyevsky. It was challenging; I frequently flipped back to earlier passages to clarify details. It was easy to find passages. When I read paperback I have some kind of tactile memory for where details are. I don't necessarily remember words, so I couldn't search. But I can find any passage in 2-10 seconds. I can't do that electronically.

jvandonsel 12y ago

Even if the participants had "equivalent reading habits and experience with tablets", just imagine if you were presented with a device as unusual as a Kindle DX. I would be distracted for many minutes. "Ooh, shiny! What does this button do?"