Paperback or Screen Books?

Paper books or screen books? That is a question that I can say that I never really thought about until now. Before reading the article, “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens,” by Ferris Jbar, (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=reading-paper-screens) that I found on Twitter from @BillSelak, I never really gave it much thought about how I processed what I read whether it was from paper or a screen. I will admit that I still like to use paperback books and as the article stated, most people still like to use paperback books too. A lot of it has to do with the experience that people have had with books ever since books have been invented. Many people like how a book smells, the physical touch of changing a page, marking a book with a highlighter or pen, or simply how heavy or light a book may feel. Humans have a natural tendency to make goals and having a physical book in hand allows people to create a “mental map” of how much they are progressing through a book.

When people read from tablet, kindle, smartphone, computer, or some other technology device; they simply do not experience the same thing that a paperback book can give. For example, the device that is used will always feel the same weight and won’t be able to map out how much is left to read. Also, reading from a devise allows the body to interact in a different way than reading a paperback book, which sometimes makes it difficult to concentrate on the words. There are different senses that are used when reading from a device rather than from a book. Despite of what people like to read off of better, the article states that there much of significant effect on the speed and comprehension of material.

One of my favorite points from the article was that there was study that took place where they gave students an assignment to read an article and then they were to answer questions based off the reading. Half of the students had to read from a screen and the other half of the students had to read from a paperback. The results showed that the students who read from the screen did a little worse than the students who read from the paperback.

I couldn’t help to think, what this means for our future students? Many of our students are going to be taking tests from computers and reading textbooks from some type of electronic device. Does this mean we are hindering their chances of doing better than they could? I think the answer is we are unsure of what it will be. The studies that have been done state that there isn’t a drastic difference of results of how people perform whether they take a test from a computer or paper and I believe a lot of it has to do with they were raised to use paper at some point in their life. However, for the babies that are born now and if they never interact with paper, then maybe there brains will be trained to read from electronic devices thoroughly and gain full comprehension from it, because that is all that they will know.  

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