The end of eReaders?

Shadow_Ferret said:

I find it interesting that everyone js so defensive, like the study is deliberately trying to kill ereaders.

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It might be because of the title of the OP's thread "The Death of E-Readers?". Feels like an anti-ereader kind of tone.


Regarding the study, I think there be might be something to it. Whenever I needed to read nonfiction for research purposes, I tend to prefer print books over reading on a screen. I tend to study and remember it better on print than in electronic form. I also highlight and take notes non-electronically (is that a word?).

When I write with pencil/pen on paper, I tend to remember better, and my writing flows faster. I wonder if it's because I am physically writing it down or it's a tactile thing?

BTW, I love both my ereader and print books. Which I prefer depends on the genre or if it's non-fiction. I usually prefer the feel of print for non-fiction and MG fiction, but I love ereaders for those big (fiction) doorstopppers.

Hapax Legomenon said:

Your ereader does not have page numbers? Weird.

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Mine does, but Goodreads had to add a percentage completed for people reading ebooks, so I assumed this was not universal.

Buffysquirrel said:

Mine does, but Goodreads had to add a percentage completed for people reading ebooks, so I assumed this was not universal.

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So can you adjust the font size on your e-reader? Do the page numbers change according to the actual e-reader 'page' you're on (so the same point might be page 20 with a large font, page 10 with a smaller font) or are the pages static to the words, based, I assume, on a print version of the book?

(My e-reader doesn't have page numbers)

jjdebenedictis said:

When I was in grad school, I noticed I had comprehension issues when I tried to read a scientific paper on a screen. It was the same information, but I understood it much better if I printed it out to read it.

I read a heck of a lot online at this point, so I really wonder if I'd be better at it now, or if I'd still find it easier to absorb information off paper. (For the record, I've never tried an ebook, but I've got family members who have been using them for a few years quite happily.)

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I agree with this. When I use e-books/journals I have to do some note making to process the arguments before I can disseminate it correctly.

bunny-gypsy said:

It might be because of the title of the OP's thread "The Death of E-Readers?". Feels like an anti-ereader kind of tone.

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Yet it's okay to write X number of articles about the death of print/novels/publishers?

Considering the story had absolutely nothing to do with the death of ereaders and was merely a study about comprehension between ereaders and hard copy, I do think the OP was trying to get an emotional response.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I find it interesting that everyone js so defensive, like the study is deliberately trying to kill ereaders.

The eye/brain connection is very complex. Print on paper is solid. The eye can focus on it with little difficulting making the translation to your brain relatively seamless. But viewing something on a screen that flickers even if you don't notice it has to have some sort of effect upon what we see and how the brain interprets it.

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But screens nowadays do NOT flicker - CRT monitors were notorious for it, and the result was a higher scan rates of 70 to 80 Hz or higher to make it well above the flicker detection rate of the eye, vs. the then broacast television standard of 60Hz interlaced. I've still got a CRT monitor or two sitting around, and I can instantly tell whether the scan rate is 60Hz or 75Hz. But either one, I wag my finger in front of it and I see several distinct shadows of my finger. On modern flatscreen monitors I see a constant blur, indicating "always on" light. This is a great improvement over CRT displays, especially the earlier ones of the Apple ][ (essentially an old analog TV display) and IBM CGA (low refresh rate AND a low-res color CRT screen, kind of like the first Pac-Man video games).

But admittedly there are still other differences between modern screens and print that may be relevant.

Maybe further detailed studies will show computer learning isn't the way to go. Maybe those studies will show this was bunk and there's no difference. I think I'll just take it with a grain of salt and pick up my fountain pen, I've got a story to finish writing.

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I find it fascinating that it may be different for different people. I can't wait to read exactly what it is and why.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I remember in the infancy of CGI, I had trouble focusing on the CGI objects. "The Last Starfighter" for instance, I could "see" the ships, but they never really registered on my brain beyond a mental blur and I certainly couldn't describe them. I wonder if that's the same phenomenon they're researching here?

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There are certainly a lot of subtleties involved in making a bitmaped image look "real" - not just increasing the resolution, but anti-aliasing of various possible types, something "Last Starfighter" might not have had.

A quick look brings up a video game example from 2009 - article here:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-saboteur-aa-blog-entry
and one of the two example pics:
http://images.eurogamer.net/articles//a/8/6/7/8/5/1/Saboteur_Aliasing_001.jpg.jpg

My e-reader (nook) and the nook and kindle apps on my ipad both include page counts, indicating my current page in the book as well as the total. However, the page counts don't seem to correspond to either the pages as displayed on the screen in the reader's "default" font, or the actual page count of either the hardcover or paperback versions of the book.

The thing that drives me nuts is that no one's thought to provide the actual word count of an ebook, or to make an app that lets you calculate it. As a writer, I really am curious about what the actual word counts are of the fantasy that's being published right now. Page count is easy for publishers to manipulate in any medium.

Roxxsmom said:

My e-reader (nook) and the nook and kindle apps on my ipad both include page counts, indicating my current page in the book as well as the total. However, the page counts don't seem to correspond to either the pages as displayed on the screen in the reader's "default" font, or the actual page count of either the hardcover or paperback versions of the book.

The thing that drives me nuts is that no one's thought to provide the actual word count of an ebook, or to make an app that lets you calculate it. As a writer, I really am curious about what the actual word counts are of the fantasy that's being published right now. Page count is easy for publishers to manipulate in any medium.

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Won't help for fantasy, but one of my favourite things about All Romance eBooks is that they include the number of words right there in the product description. Maybe there's an SF/F eBook retailer out there that does the same?

Shadow_Ferret said:

I find it interesting that everyone js so defensive, like the study is deliberately trying to kill ereaders.

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Has nothing to do with being defensive, has to do with being skeptical of "studies" like this. It's childishly simple to construct this sort of study to put out whatever results you want it to. I don't buy the results and won't until I see them duplicated by someone else...ideally more than one someone elses.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Considering the story had absolutely nothing to do with the death of ereaders and was merely a study about comprehension between ereaders and hard copy, I do think the OP was trying to get an emotional response.

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I think the OP has a future in article writing. Headlines and titles which grab people's attention are really difficult!

RikWriter said:

Has nothing to do with being defensive, has to do with being skeptical of "studies" like this. It's childishly simple to construct this sort of study to put out whatever results you want it to. I don't buy the results and won't until I see them duplicated by someone else...ideally more than one someone elses.

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Quite often it's not the study which is wrong, it's the reporting of it.

Angry Guy said:

My gut feel is that this is more a matter of what you're used to. I'm sure that users of quill pens felt that ball-points would cause writers to lose connection with their writing as well.

If you grow up with it, you learn different cues.

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Yes. Also the study has a number of problems in terms of methodology.

I think we'll need to wait another ten years, at least, before we look at the data in a deeply meaningful way.

There's always a knee-jerk reaction to cultural changes around technology.

Plato on Writing:

Plato—Phaedrus 275a-b said:

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

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One of the primary differences between paper and digital text is that paper is locative, that is, you have an easily identifiable reference if everyone is looking at the same paper/version/edition of a book.

When you're teaching Jane Eyre, it's very useful to tell students to look at page 34 in a paper edition.

Even when we're all using the same digital edition, I can't do that. Your page 34 is likely not going to be mine.

Citation is tricky.

Sometimes there's a price; you gain some, you lose some, but as with writing and memory, I don't see paper vs screen as natural enemies or mutually exclusive.

Captcha said:

So can you adjust the font size on your e-reader? Do the page numbers change according to the actual e-reader 'page' you're on (so the same point might be page 20 with a large font, page 10 with a smaller font) or are the pages static to the words, based, I assume, on a print version of the book?

(My e-reader doesn't have page numbers)

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You know what, I adjusted the font and line spacing on my ereader and found that adjusting the page numbers actually do not change... which makes sense as to why the number does not necessarily change every time I tap.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I find it interesting that everyone is so defensive, like the study is deliberately trying to kill ereaders.

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That will perhaps be partly because of the title chosen for this thread.

Even if the study's entirely valid (which seems likely?), and even if it's reliably reproducible (which seems possible?), I still don't quite see how you get from there to "the end of eReaders"?

Old Hack said:

... several studies have demonstrated some interesting connections between how removed writers are from their work, and the work which results. Using a pen and paper is a very direct connection; using a screen and keyboard is less directly connected; individual writers produce very different works when they work in different ways. It's very interesting.

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Not trying to derail the thread, but do you have any citations on this, I'd love it if you would PM me with them. I find the idea fascinating.

Meanwhile, I won't call the study bogus, but I will use that word for the thread title. And I'm surprised no one called Hanson out for dropping a link without any further commentary on it beyond, "Interesting research."

gothicangel said:

Yet it's okay to write X number of articles about the death of print/novels/publishers?

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Absolutely fine. Paper is going to go the same way that Music CDs, Movie DVDs, and physical video games went/are going.

50 years from now, nobody will be reading physical books and they'll only be found in libraries.

Captcha said:

So can you adjust the font size on your e-reader? Do the page numbers change according to the actual e-reader 'page' you're on (so the same point might be page 20 with a large font, page 10 with a smaller font) or are the pages static to the words, based, I assume, on a print version of the book?

(My e-reader doesn't have page numbers)

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If I increase the size of the font, I stay on the same page for longer. So clearly 'page' has some fixed value for the reader. These are .epubs I'm reading, if that makes a difference.

(there will now be a short pause while I figure out how to reset the font)

Bufkus said:

Absolutely fine. Paper is going to go the same way that Music CDs, Movie DVDs, and physical video games went/are going.

50 years from now, nobody will be reading physical books and they'll only be found in libraries.

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...I'm still finding physical copies of Music CDs, DVDs, and video games to this day. And print books, of course.

Today, I was at Gamestop, FYE, Barnes and Noble in my local mall, and I still see lots of people buying physical copies of all of the above.

Bufkus said:

Absolutely fine. Paper is going to go the same way that Music CDs, Movie DVDs, and physical video games went/are going.

50 years from now, nobody will be reading physical books and they'll only be found in libraries.

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This (and similar articles) has some surprising info regarding music sales:
http://theweek.com/article/index/254901/the-baffling-revival-of-the-vinyl-lp

While some things have definitely gone away (8-track cartridges, 78RPM records that require the big stylus), others have held on at some small but profitable volume for those who produce them. Printed books may go the way of LPs in that they effectively disappear and drop to a small percentage of the market, but I can see where authors and some fans will always want a print run's worth of a new book, even if ebooks drop far below Amazon's $9.99 or whatever they're trying to fix the price at. Unlike an ebook or a download, a physical book can become a collectible object.

Now in 50 years it COULD get so bad that when someone wants to read a physical book they get confused because so many will have never done so before, but maybe Youtube will still be around, or whatever serves up the equivalent of today's videos will still have these available to help the book reader of the future (if they can understand our quaint early-21st-Century word usage):
Medeival edition (with modern English subtitles):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ
Modern edition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az1JRmmVxgA

Bufkus said:

Absolutely fine. Paper is going to go the same way that Music CDs, Movie DVDs, and physical video games went/are going.

50 years from now, nobody will be reading physical books and they'll only be found in libraries.

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In fifty years there will still be areas of the world where technology can't reach; many people don't have easy access to an electricity supply; and technology changes, so digital files which are accessible now might well be obsolete by then. Print books will still work well under those conditions. I am not so sure that they'll have been abandoned while so many people will still need them.

They took 50 graduate students and divided them into two groups. They had 25 read eReaders and 25 read print. This is a small sample, but it's also different people reading on eReaders and print. How do we know the ones reading print wouldn't have been just aware of the sequence of events on an eReader, and the ones reading an eReader just as unaware of the sequence in print? It doesn't sound like a very controlled study.
That said, online reading experience, with all of its attendant hyperlinks and skipping around and highlights, has in general probably trained the human mind to read less "deeply," to scan for information more. The current generations has been shown to have larger reading comprehension problems than the past generation.

Actually would think that adding hyperlinks to especially academic books in digital form would help. Most academic work on computers are just scanned PDFs and the like. When most people try to read an academic work deeply they're flipping the pages around while in most digital formats that's very difficult. I think if people are going to make resource books they're going to have to start building them more like wikis.

Hapax Legomenon said:

Actually would think that adding hyperlinks to especially academic books in digital form would help. Most academic work on computers are just scanned PDFs and the like. When most people try to read an academic work deeply they're flipping the pages around while in most digital formats that's very difficult. I think if people are going to make resource books they're going to have to start building them more like wikis.

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There's the idea of opening different areas of the file in different windows. Many programming editors can do this with text files. For a pdf file, make a copy and open the copy in a second window. Make as many copies and open as many windows as needed.

This is one thing that makes big screens and multiple screens really handy.

benbradley said:

There's the idea of opening different areas of the file in different windows. Many programming editors can do this with text files. For a pdf file, make a copy and open the copy in a second window. Make as many copies and open as many windows as needed.

This is one thing that makes big screens and multiple screens really handy.

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Skim is a PDF viewer that offers split-pane viewing. I don't know why it isn't a more common feature for PDF viewers.

It would be interesting to see if the age of the ones studied mattered and if it changed over time. I think for me the claim is true, but it could just be my mind slipping.