Results Show That Improved Comprehension with the Printed Page
Paperback readers, rejoice! It turns out reading books on e-readers doesn’t give your brain the same experience as those paper books gathering dust on your bookshelf. A new study by European researchers found that recollection of plot points and story lines were “significantly” worse for readers who read on a Kindle versus paperback books, some reports suggest. Fifty readers were given a mystery book to read, half were given a Kindle, and the other half, a paperback. The researchers, led by Anne Mangen from the University of Stavanger in Norway, discovered that reading on a Kindle prevented readers from comprehending the literature as well as reading it on paper. “The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure, i.e. when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order,” Mangen informed. Does Paper or PDF Really Matter? The Kindle versus paperback study is a very small sample and thus prone to all sorts of uncertainties, but it ...