Because all of my Seton Hill students get iPads and MacBooks, I try to assign ebooks whenever possible, though students are welcome to use paper, too. This study suggests that students who choose the ebook option have a harder time reconstructing the a timeline of plot events. I’ll keep that in mind as we discuss our texts.
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.
“It’s interesting to us that the differences were both related to time and temporality — why is that?” said Ms. Mangen, who presented her team’s study last month at a conference in Turin, Italy. —NYTimes.com.
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I’m a hybrid reader. I’m waiting for the day when they sell new books with a digital download code…like they already do with vinyl. The physical copy in the home, digital copy in the public sphere.
Digital textbooks are fine because outdated physical copies are a really sad thing.
Full disclosure: I am a professional bookseller who thinks that 100 Classic Novels is one of the best DS “games” ever made.
I prefer paper.
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The physicality that makes coffee-table books and gift books so appealing means that in many cases it’s easier for me to *work* with books in electronic form. I love smelling and touching and giving and receiving physical books, but I also love searching ebooks, and synching my progress and annotations across multiple devices, and tapping on words to get definitions, and enlarging the type size when my eyes get tired, carrying around an archived library of books I’ve finished. In my AmLit 1800-1915 class, I do require the whole class to purchase the same print edition of Huckleberry Finn, and I require them to use their iPads to practice annotating an electronic text, but other than that students can choose to go paper or electronic, as they prefer.
I’m the same way, Lisa. I can still often locate a passage quicker in a physical book. Very interesting to consider.
I agree! I recall text based on if it’s located on the left or right page and top, middle or bottom. I met an eBook salesperson and I’m not drinking the juice. Lol