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Let's Get Bookish About E-Readers and Study Them

by February 26, 2009 5 Comments

By Karen A. Frenkel

Amazon released Kindle 2, the second version of its e-reader, two days ago on Monday February 23, and product reviews and Op Eds are upon us. Sony has been competing with its Reader 700. A Dutch company, iREX makes an e-reader called the ILiad. And start-up Plastic Logic, of Mountain View, CA, recently demonstrated a prototype of its device.

Amazon won’t release sales figures. Sony claims it sold 300,000 devices since its original debuted in 2006. Publishers are creating electronic versions of their titles—about 240,000 titles are available. And last December, The New York Times proclaimed that e-books (which have been around since the late 1990s) are taking hold. Clearly many powers that be perceive a large market.

When Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos appeared on The Daily Show, however, Jon Stewart commented, “It just doesn’t feel like the kind of thing you want to fall asleep with on your chest.” But later he added, “Anything that gets people to read more, I’m all for it.” Here's the clip on the Huffington Post.

But do e-readers get people to read more?

Copy on Amazon’s Kindle site says, “We designed (the Kindle) with long-form reading in mind,” but that’s in the context of it being easy to hold, like a book. Consumers hail e-readers, saying they are superior to LCD displays and report less eyestrain and headaches. But what about research comparing e-books to tree-books?

Amazon says it has collected only anecdotal evidence from users. E Ink (which owns the technology that both Amazon and Sony licensed for their e-readers) confirmed that it hasn’t conducted any studies. I suppose I could cull through Amazon’s Kindle site to see what percent of the 5,000-plus testimonials report symptoms. Sony didn’t respond to my inquiries.

E-books may indeed be great, but it’s also possible that people will read on them for shorter periods of time without knowing why. If their reading habits are shaped by these devices, that could, in turn, effect attention spans. Maybe readers will find something boring when really they just got tired. Our notion of a novel might change as might demand for non-fiction prose. People may start to read less. More magazines and newspapers may appear on e-readers. This worries me. People are so overwhelmed with information today that they are already reading shorter and shorter pieces online. And not everything can be explained in 800 words or less.

I tried to find studies assessing peoples’ reading experiences with e-readers. I searched PubMed with the e-readers' names, “ebooks,” “e-books,” “e-readers,” “ereaders,” and “eyestrain” and found nothing. Three studies assessing medical e-textbooks showed up under “electronic books.” I queried the Association for Computing Machinery’s database and found some not very recent literature about reading on Palm Pilots, Pocket PCs and other small handheld devices.

Somehow by Googling (I no longer remember the keywords), I found an article by Anne Mangen: “Digital Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion,” published in the Journal of Research and Reading last December. Mangan, a researcher at the Center for Reading Research in Norway, found that reading hypertext stories generates a new form of mental orientation that is not totally imersive. Although a reader may avoid navigation tools and links, subconsciously he or she gets distracted by opportunities to do something else. Mangen also says that young people who have grown up reading on screens may have different reading habits and preferences than older ones who’ve read tree-books most of their lives.

Gene Golovchinsky, Senior Research Scientist at FX PAL in Palo Alto, CA and a longtime e-book and ergonomics expert, says if studies had been conducted and resulted in positive findings, then e-book manufacturers would be touting them. So there may even be negative results, he says. Because print on traditional computer displays results in lower reading speeds, people didn’t like reading on them; for over 20 years they’ve been saying, “If it’s a large file, I print it out.”

User interface guru Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, Fremont, CA, finds it “suspicious” and “strange” that companies promoting the technology haven’t done any studies about reader comfort. They would not be hard to do, he says, and these companies could easily afford them. He’d like to see a formal reading speed study investigate words per minute for different technologies, printed books, and different computer screens. E-book manufacturers could also ask readers to rate the pleasantness of their experience and give their personal opinions about it.

Jeffrey Anshel, an optometrist who practices in Carlsbad, CA, sees patients with eyestrain. He offered this solution: invoke the 20:20:20 rule. Take 20 seconds to look 20 ft away every 20 minutes. But how many people take time to do that?

Golovchinsky distinguished between “active reading” done by professionals at the office, and reading for leisure. Active reading involves note-taking, quoting, comparing documents, etc. He says a certain tech-savvy population may be interested in the current crop of e-books for leisure reading, but only when e-books offer functionality difficult or impossible to obtain on paper will they become important to the larger market of knowledge workers.

Unlike Nielsen, however, Golovchinsky believes studies of e-reading are not trivial to design. If a difference were found during reading, it might be hard to ascribe to any particular factor, so you need to control for the weight and size of device, and lots of other factors. But these are not insurmountable obstacles, he says.

Shouldn’t e-reader makers and academic researchers study what readers experience with these devices? Those contributing to the Kindle site are a self-selected group. If there’s a generational difference in reading habits, I’d like to know. It’s not too early for scientific studies. Findings could have a lasting impact on our culture. Right now companies are jumping into the market, and consumers, perhaps dazzled by technical capabilities, are clamoring for products that may influence them in unknown ways. What do you think? Would you like to see serious research on e-readers?

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  • http://theresgottabeaway.wordpress.com Miriam Gordon

    Thanks for this Karen. Very thoroughly researched and educational entry on a very interesting topic for our times. I love reading, still love turning pages in a book.

  • John Verity

    Intriguing topic, these e-readers. I have yet to actually see one, either in a person's hands or on the shelf of a store, but as someone both moderately hooked on gadgets and, much more so, an avid buyer, borrower, and reader of traditional books, I am way curious.

    I can't tell from your article if the makers themselves claim that their new gizmos will actually encourage reading in any way, of either short-form items or traditional, bookish texts. If they do make such claims, then it's worth asking that they prove those claims somehow. Jon Stewart's statement may not be cause, however.
    I suppose the makers' response might be that the proof is in the pudding - that strong sales of their machines, especially sales beyond the I'll-buy-anything "early-adopter" crowd is done with its purchases, would show that this new way of reading is worthy and useful and perhaps more attractive than using traditional books.

    The suppliers might also respond by asking why they should be required to prove anything about their products. That's just not the way things work, is it?, in this free-for-all marketplace of rampaging digital technology, aka today's world. Is Facebook required to show that its (hugely popular) "social networking" service somehow improves friendships, however one might wish to measure that? Is Google required to prove that it's NOT making us dumber, as some journalist-critics have suggested (I have not actually read N. Carr's Atlantic Monthly article that was titled to this effect, last year, but like many people, I find the question he raised most intriguing.)

    Apple Computer surely seems to have succeeded, with its iPod/iTunes scheme, in essentially dismissing and obsoleting the decades of effort that the hi-fi industry put into getting us all to buy ever-more spiffy home stereo systems with which to listen to our ever-expanding collections of recorded music. There's no question about the inferiority in the quality of sound available from digitally compressed audio files (MP3, AAC, etc.) versus well-made optical or vinyl disks or good audio tapes, etc., played through good speakers, etc. Yet, even with its comparatively inferior sound quality, the iPod and similar devices have enjoyed massive acceptance, evidently because they provide sound quality that is good enough along with the added benefits of greater portability and less need for messy, space-consuming stacks of records, CDs, and cassettes. (The iPod also does away with the album cover and CD booklet, which I, like many old people (!), tend to miss.) And neither Apple or any other maker of portable audio players is expected to show proof that its wares improve listening habits or make the world better or increase the public's general understanding or appreciation of music. They put a new type of product on the market that has, for whatever reasons, and with whatever side-effects, has succeeded. The market has spoken, in other words, so what more is there to say?

    Now, that attitude or response - the market knows all, technology proceeds, shut up and take what it gives you - is clearly open to criticism. And the more I think about the digital juggernaut, the more I wish I were hearing more such criticism. Perhaps resistance is futile, but one only has to look at what the automobile has done to the geographical landscape of America (and increasingly, that of the entire world) to wonder what the Internet (including Kindle, etc.) is doing to our mental landscape and human habits.

    Perhaps Kindle et al will change book buying and reading habits in a similar way. It will be interesting to watch. Already, so much reading - consumption of text? browsing? surfing? what's the right verb? - has moved from the paper book and magazine and newspaper to the digital screen connected to a seemingly fathomless reservoir of "content." And we should remember that reading as we know and think about it - from bound sheaves of paper, silently to ourselves, etc. - is not a given; the act of reading has changed radically during the course of history.
    Until the Middle Ages, reading (in the West, at least) was mainly a vocal exercise, performed either out loud to a room full of fellow scribes (hence the word dictator) or as a quiet mumble to one's self. The words monks read from scrolls and books were generally considered to be the words of God, each one a succulent morsel of sweet wisdom to be savored and voiced. In fact, for centuries, words were written without a space between each one, so only by reading aloud could a text be read and understood. Eventually, words got separated by spaces, and alphabetized lists of topics, tables of contents, indices, footnotes, and many other new structures were employed, and the text was disengaged from the page - virtualized, one might say, and made available for silent contemplation. And much more, much of which is artfully described and analyzed by Ivan Illich in his 1993 book, In the Vineyard of the Text.

  • http://palblog.fxpal.com/?author=4 Gene Golovchinsky

    The Kindle undoubtedly provides value to those who like to read for pleasure. The value comes in being able to get the books they want to read, when they want them, at a reduced price. The Kindle also provides value to Amazon: they save on printing and/or warehousing costs. The Kindle probably also increases the profits of publishers, but I don't know the details of their agreements.

    How comparable the reading experience is between paper and the Kindle is probably a gray area (pun intended). Certainly some mass-market paperbacks have poor print quality and poor contrast, and yet people buy them. The displays are reflective, like paper, (not emissive, like LCD screens) so they should be easier on the eyes. And one can reasonably expect that the quality of displays on these devices will improve incrementally over time.

    The problem with the Kindle is its emphasis (by design) on being book-like. Although it is a computer, it is designed to hide that fact from the user as much as possible. This drives in part the need to have a long battery life (who wants to charge a book just to read it?), a low-power (hence bi-stable, hence monochrome) display, and a low-power CPU. The less powerful the CPU, the longer the battery lasts.

    So in the end, you get a reasonable book-like reading experience, with a nearly invisible computer. But a side effect of this design choice is that the computer is unable to do anything else that it might otherwise be able to do to help the person read more effectively and efficiently. Reading aids such as search, juxtopposition, annotation, translation, animation, etc. are discarded in favor of long battery life.

    This is great for reading novels, but not so good for other kinds of reading that many people do professionally.
    As John pointed out in his comment above, words-on-paper technology has evolved to meet the demands of readers. I hope that e-book technology will evolve to support the entire ecology of activities that accompany reading, rather than declaring victory and withdrawing.

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  • http://palblog.fxpal.com/?p=519 FXPAL Blog » Blog Archive » Reading? In a browser!?

    [...] She clearly has a sense of the possibilities when interacting with a document on paper. Why the surprise then that reading on the web is so unpleasant? Skimming, OK; but deep reading, active reading? It seems obvious that a tool that offers none of physical versatility, none of the annotation capability and poor contrast to boot does not make for a positive experience. Current ebook devices aren’t much better, either, as Karen Frenkel points out. [...]