Are E-Books Making Us Stupid?

[ekbell]

In my browsing through high school and elementary school textbooks, I've found (aside from the occasional open access text) that facing pages often look to be designed as a unit taking advantage of the full width of the text with tight integration of main text, images, diagrams and textboxes. This makes them particularly ill-designed for ebook format, including PDF's where information is given at most one page at a time.

It is no surprise that student reading such a text on a screen would have problems retaining as much as a student reading the text as it was designed to be read.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by ekbell

In my browsing through high school and elementary school textbooks, I've found (aside from the occasional open access text) that facing pages often look to be designed as a unit taking advantage of the full width of the text with tight integration of main text, images, diagrams and textboxes. This makes them particularly ill-designed for ebook format, including PDF's where information is given at most one page at a time.

It is no surprise that student reading such a text on a screen would have problems retaining as much as a student reading the text as it was designed to be read.

PDF reading programs can usually display multiple pages together. For those that can, showing facing pages together is easy, so you could read PDFs as intended if you wanted to. Of course, you would also need a display that is capable of showing the two pages together.

[Quoth]

Two A4 pages side by side is A3

At 300 ppi (pixels per inch) the image needs to be 3508 x 4961 pixels.
At 150 ppi the image needs to be 1754 x 2480 pixels.
A 1440 x 2560 16:9 panel (Video 2K) will let you read two A4 pages side by side. At at about 24" is nearly actual size. That's about 122 dpi which is about a minimum resolution. My 2002 1600 x 1200 laptop was about 15.5" 4:3 or about 133 dpi. My current laptop screen is 15" and at 1920 x 1080 not as good even for one A4 unless I was to tip it on its side to 1080 x 1920 and use a separate keyboard. My 2K screen does rotate, but the 9:16 aspect is too tall for portrait mode. You'd get crick using the full height of the screen.

Some desktop and a few tablet epub reader programs/apps and some ereaders can do two two epub pages side by side.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Quoth

My current laptop screen is 15" and at 1920 x 1080 not as good even for one A4

My trailing-edge laptop (2019 model) is 3072x1920. Even a MacBook Air (pretty common high-school student machine here) is 2560x1600, similar to a middling iPad.

And people can zoom in to read smaller pockets of text.

[Quoth]

2019 isn't trailing edge. It's not like 1991. The 3072x1920 on a laptop sounds like a "retina screen".

The MacBook Air 2560x1600 also sounds like a "retina screen".

Those usually use the extra resolution to render fonts without sub-pixel addressing and often applications use 2 x 2 native pixels.

Without knowing the aspect ratio and size of the three screens one can't make any assumptions as to how good they are for A4 PDF or about the dpi. At least the iPad works well in Portrait and I doubt an iPad at 2560x1600 is "middling" compared to the price of other tablets. It would want to be about 13" to 14" diagonal for A4 single page actual size.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Quoth

2019 isn't trailing edge. It's not like 1991. The 3072x1920 on a laptop sounds like a "retina screen".

Trailing edge as in already obsolete. It's a pre-M1 model.

I have middle-aged eyes. I can open two A4 PDFs (medical papers, not huge-font stuff), side by side, and I find them readable.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by meeera

Trailing edge as in already obsolete. It's a pre-M1 model.

Laptops are not obsolete or trailing edge unless you can't get a currently supported OS, of any description, for them. A 32 bit Intel/AMD is nearly that as Linux Mint 20.x is 64 bits only. However Linux Mint 19.3 does have 32 bit support till 2023. It actually runs better on a 2002 Intel P4 mobile (32 bits) than on a 2019 Atom (in 32 bit or 64 bits versions).

Or if the laptop is too slow. Many Atom based netbooks and tablets were too slow from new.

Also ideally an M1 Apple needs all new programs compiled for ARM. I remember Apple 68000 and PowerPC laptops; and later versions of MAC OS8
ran only on PowerPC.

Originally Posted by meeera

I have middle-aged eyes. I can open two A4 PDFs (medical papers, not huge-font stuff), side by side, and I find them readable.

Reading glasses are great. Also the second time I increase font size on an ebook on my Libra I know it's time to go to sleep.

[oneuser]

Definitely. Touching the pages of the book you are about to read is another feeling.

[DiapDealer]

I have no trouble believing that retention can be affected by how one consumes their text (electronic vs physical). I also have no trouble believing that one way might even be conceivably better for many people (with regard to studying and learning).

But what I reject completely is that these changes have to result in humans becoming more stupid. Did humans not adapt to written stories vs oral story-telling? Did they not adapt to the codex from the scroll? All while still managing to broaden their horizons.

What hurdles--exactly--do electronic texts pose that people think humans couldn't possibly overcome and adapt to? I don't mean "what are some cognitive differences between reading electronically vs reading physically that give people pause" that everyone has already trotted out. I mean, "Why will the electronic paradigm shift be the one that the human mind can't possibly adapt to, and use to broaden their cognitive horizons even more?" Why will this paradigm shift be humanity's Learning Rubicon rather than just another turn in the road?

[gmw]

I'm not convinced we needed any help.

Given that I'm reading this article on an electronic device, do they expect me to remember it anyway? In fact, that déjà vu feeling we're having is not really déjà vu at all. We did read it 10 years ago and our brains dutifully discarded most of it as unnecessary detritus.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by gmw

I'm not convinced we needed any help.

Same. We have ALWAYS been stupid. Ebooks won't change that.

[crane3]

This thread reminds me of the Mac vs PC conflict on whether the mac or pc users can read/write better; this was when the mac512 was marketed & scammed people in claiming that "all you need is a mouse".

Some highschool teachers did their studies & published it in the local newspapers; the pc users "won".

I think literacy got worst not because of the use of ebooks but the texting on cell phones. Just think of all what text got truncated in spelling & the acronyms being used; some people even use the same style as texting in newsgroups. I'm outdated as too much stuff is unreadble or cannot be interpreted by me; even my spelling is getting bad.....

[cfrizz]

Originally Posted by crane3

I think literacy got worst not because of the use of ebooks but the texting on cell phones. Just think of all what text got truncated in spelling & the acronyms being used; some people even use the same style as texting in newsgroups. I'm outdated as too much stuff is unreadble or cannot be interpreted by me; even my spelling is getting bad.....

This 100%! When I got laid off in 2010, I sent myself back to school for some retraining. I had to take an english class and the teacher asked us to write a 3 paragraph story.

She had to state to the class that texting spelling is NOT acceptable to use and that everything had to be spelled out correctly and to make sure to use correct punctuation and paragraphs!

At the end of class I went up to her and asked her if was it really necessary to tell grown people this? She said absolutely, otherwise she would get a whole bunch of papers that were written as texts!

I'm not sure if it's stupidity, or just lazziness.

The mind boggles!

[DiapDealer]

Texting doesn't create morons who can't read or write. It's not as if those adults who would turn in their English assignments in text pidgin would have been English majors or authors if they'd never taken up texting.

People have been writing grammatically (not to mention syntactically) horrifying letters and hand-written notes to each other for centuries. The text medium is not the enemy of literacy.

[Quoth]

It's poor education that does it!
My wife taught Adult numeracy, she knows about poor education.

Also the parents having no books in the house. Carnegie tried to help.