Darn It, Santa, I said Leave a BOOK Under the Tree, Not an E-Book

Last summer a survey website, Teenreads.com, conducted a poll of some 4,000 people 18 years old or younger about their reading habits and preferences, and many of the results will come as a surprise. For parents who fret that their children text or yak too much or immerse themselves day and night in YouTube or Facebook, the surprise will be a pleasant one. As for those of you who believe that youth are in the vanguard of the e-book revolution - well, you're in for a shock.

You can read a summary of the survey here, or read it in depth in What Do Teens Want?. For now, let's just focus on e-books:

While we hear that teens have embraced all things digital and thus have a large interest in reading e-books, our findings didn't support this claim.

When we asked about their affection for a digital reading device for fun reading (not schoolwork) if the price were affordable, 46% said they preferred printed books. Another 38% said they would like one, and 16% indicated they were not sure how they felt about this.

When asked if they'd like to read textbooks as e-books, they were evenly split, with 36% saying yes, 33% saying they were not sure, and 31% saying they would not be interested.

Nearly one-quarter (24%) have read an e-book, while 27% would like to read one. Almost half (49%) said they have no interest in reading e-books.

When asked how they have read an e-book, 26% have done so on a computer while 33% used a dedicated digital reading device and 5% used another method. Seven out of 10 (71%) say they have never read one.

To keep things in perspective, the surveyors state, "We recognized that we were surveying an exceptional group, what we call über readers. So the results reflect teens who are already drawn to books; we are not studying what keeps nonreaders from picking up a book."

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

Wired Editor Lehrer Thinks Brain Will Get used to E-Books

Jonah Lehrer, a cognitive neuroscientist and contributing editor at Wired, is sympathetic to those who have recently expressed concern that the focused, immersive experience of reading paper books will be compromised by e-book reading. (See The Medium is the Screen, The Message is Distraction). In fact, he confesses he himself recently struggled with a Tolstoy epic in print format and even fell asleep a few times. "In a world oversaturated with information." he says, "I wonder if it's increasingly hard to savor the languid process of reading a really long book."

That said, he's confident that "after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page."

"I don't worry too much about the effect of E-Books on the reading brain. I think one of the most interesting findings regarding literacy and the human cortex is the fact that there are actually two distinct pathways activated by the sight of letters. (The brain is stuffed full of redundancies.) As the lab of Stanislas Dehaene has found, when people are reading "routinized, familiar passages" a part of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA, or the ventral pathway) is activated. This pathway processes letters and words in parallel, allowing us to read quickly and effortlessly. It's the pathway that literate readers almost always rely upon."

You can see how he reached his conclusion in Reading, E-Books and the Brain, posted on scienceblogs.com.

RC

Is That a Vook You're Screading or Are You Just Kindling?

While neuroscientists and child development specialists have been delving into the psychology of reading e-books and vooks (see The Medium Is The Screen, But The Message is Distraction), a blogger named Danny Bloom has occupied himself with the nomenclature.

Plain old "reading" simply doesn't seem to cover the various acts necessary to experience a multimedia vook that we have to click, scroll, screen, watch, listen to, and - yes - read. So Bloom, who has been aggregating on his blog a great deal of cogent information and articles about e-books, has proposed the word "Screading", combining screening and reading.

We buy it completely, and from now on, "Screading" it will be.

Bloom also brought to my attention that "Kindle" is now a verb. It may be a while before "Nook" achieves verb status, however.

RC

A Screen-Distracted 15-Year-Old Speaks Up About E-Books

In connection with our recent posting, The Medium Is Screens. The Message Is Distraction...

Anecdotal support for the concern expressed by child development authorities about reading on screen comes from Lily, a 15-year-0ld, who left this comment on the NYTimes "Room for Debate" blogpost:

"I am 15 years old, and an avid reader. I love a good hardcover or paperback, physical pages are easier on my eyes, and I understand completely what my parents are saying when they lament that print newspapers are going extinct. Don't get me wrong; the digital age is great. I read the NY Times, the Washington Post, and lots of other blogs/sites online. When I come across a word I don't know, I can look it up in 5 seconds. But I agree with several of the authors above that the sheer volume of information on the web is overwhelming, and is an incredible distraction. I'll be reading poems on some literary archive site, click on an add that looks interesting, then remember that I wanted to post something on facebook, and completely forget about what I was doing originally. Sometimes I find myself switching activities even more frequently than every 3 minutes, and I don't think young people are especially good at multi-tasking. I just think that multi-tasking has become unavoidable because of how driven to distraction we are by all the bombarding sidebars. I don't spend enough time anymore reading "real" books, and so while e-books seem fine, I'd ideally like to maintain regular reading in both mediums."

The Medium is The Screen. The Message is Distraction

"My own research shows that people are continually distracted when working with digital information. They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly."

That observation was made by Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction. But it is also the collective verdict of five experts invited by the New York Times to participate in a debate entitled Does the Brain Like E-Books?. We briefly posted about it the other day but after examining the transcript we feel the contents of the "debate" deserve closer attention. The reason we put "debate" in quotation marks is that there doesn't seem to be much disagreement about the conclusion that "watching books", as we call it, compromises our ability to immerse ourselves in books. This is particularly true for children.

Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, writes that "people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent... Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read."

Concentrating on serious reading and avoiding distraction "depends on the user's strength of character," she says. Her comment reflects the theme of Distraction by Mark Curtis (no relation), the book pictured here, namely, that "a new sense of discipline is required to prevent us drowning in distraction."

Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that "No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain." But "my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks)."

"The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it."

Finally, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, writes that

The most important ongoing change to reading itself in today’s online environment is the cheapening of the word. In teaching college students to write, I tell them (as teachers always have) to make every word count, to linger on each phrase until it is right, to listen to the sound of each sentence.

But these ideas seem increasingly bizarre in a world where (in any decent-sized gathering of students) you can practically see the text messages buzz around the room and bounce off the walls, each as memorable as a housefly; where the narrowing time between writing for and publishing on the Web is helping to kill the art of editing by crushing it to death. The Internet makes words as cheap and as significant as Cheese Doodles

As e-books move out of their infancy and into a dominant role in the reading life of our society, it is imperative that we recognize the significant psychological differences between reading on screen and reading on paper.

Professor Gloria Mark, deeply concerned about the distractions engendered by screen media, expresses her own preference: "I’d much rather curl up in an easy chair with a paper book. It’s not only an escape into a world of literature but it’s an escape from my digital devices."

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.