[llreader]

There was an interesting opinion piece in the NYTimes today, entitled "Does the Brain Like E-Books?". Five different specialist comment on how eBooks compare to traditional texts.

EDIT: Very sorry, I didn't include a link! http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.c...-like-e-books/

# Alan Liu, English professor
# Sandra Aamodt, author, “Welcome to Your Brain”
# Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development
# David Gelernter, computer scientist
# Gloria Mark, professor of informatics

I liked the pieces by Liu and Mark. Liu discusses "the balance between focal and peripheral attention" and Mark talks about the dynamics of reading online, hypertext information:

Reading online is thus not just about reading text in isolation. When you read news, or blogs or fiction, you are reading one document in a networked maze of an unfathomable amount of information. 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.

Aamolt says:

To a great extent, the computer’s usefulness for serious reading depends on the user’s strength of character. Distractions abound on most people’s computer screens. The reading speed reported in academic studies does not include delays induced by clicking away from the text to see the new email that just arrived or check out what’s new on your favorite blog. In one study, workers switched tasks about every three minutes and took over 23 minutes on average to return to a task. Frequent task switching costs time and interferes with the concentration needed to think deeply about what you read.

Wolf says :

For 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).

These comments resonate with my experience of reading, working and studying in an always-connected environment. I am doing a (second) Master's program at the moment, and I find many of the assignments initially overwhelming, because the reading material is, essentially, infinite. It is hard to get a focus on how much depth to go into with the material.

The distraction factor is huge as well (I am at work right now ).

One of the important reasons I decided to buy a Sony Reader is that it has no internet connection. I am hoping this will help me focus better when reading (both for studies and pleasure). This issue also ties into recent discussions about the new Google book proposal (which remains a bit murky). At first, some people assumed that the books available online would be downloadable, and others assumed they would be net-access only. Most were not sure. But almost universally, the idea of reading books online was considered a bad thing. I think we instinctively know this is not a good medium for reading long texts.

What do you think?