Why digital natives prefer reading in print.

[elleng]

Last edited Mon Feb 23, 2015, 12:24 PM - Edit history (1)

Frank Schembari loves books — printed books. He loves how they smell. He loves scribbling in the margins, underlining interesting sentences, folding a page corner to mark his place.

Schembari is not a retiree who sips tea at Politics and Prose or some other bookstore. He is 20, a junior at American University, and paging through a thick history of Israel between classes, he is evidence of a peculiar irony of the Internet age: Digital natives prefer reading in print.

“I like the feeling of it,” Schembari said, reading under natural light in a campus atrium, his smartphone next to him. “I like holding it. It’s not going off. It’s not making sounds.”

Textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning, a bias that surprises reading experts given the same group’s proclivity to consume most other content digitally. A University of Washington pilot study of digital textbooks found that a quarter of students still bought print versions of e-textbooks that they were given for free.

“These are people who aren’t supposed to remember what it’s like to even smell books,” said Naomi S. Baron, an American University linguist who studies digital communication. “It’s quite astounding.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/why-digital-natives-prefer-reading-in-print-yes-you-read-that-right/2015/02/22/8596ca86-b871-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html

EDIT: Having read comments, I'd like to say THANKS! I have 2 HARD books for my little grandsons, 1 year, and 7 months, and am eager to get to the post office to mail them! (Of course, they begin by CHEWING them, but that's ok too!!!) I purchased them at my/my daughters' favorite 'toy' store, so they're a double blessing for memories!

[Hekate]

1. There's still hope for literacy and bibliophilia!

Pass the teapot, will you? I'm so pleased.

[tech3149]

2. Amen!

I may be past 60 rather than millenial but I could never deal with the transition of technical manuals prom hard copy to pdf's. There was no comparison in functionality and ease of use with a printed manual.

[jollyreaper2112]

3. Funny

I appreciate my portability and ease of access with digital. There are more distractions reading on a phone so I put it in airplane mode to not be disturbed.

[Nay]

4. Although I have a Kindle and use it when I travel, as a lifelong reader I really prefer

actual books. There really isn't a comparison. As for textbooks, I have no idea how students actually study with e-books -- that seems impossible to me. You can't even flip through an electronic book, not in the real-book sense!

[Paka]

5. Love it!

As an old fart I much prefer non-digital books for all of those physical reasons. It makes me happy to see that digital natives agree.

[Igel]

6. And that's what the data show they should like.

You don't retain as much. You read digital in fits and starts, you have a harder time making notes, you don't tend to pay as close attention. It's ephemeral. Even when you read from start to finish there's less of a tendency to be able to go back a page to check something, like facts together.

Digital is good for skimming, for flighty reading. For sequential narrative that's redundant. It's bad for dense text, for stuff that requires heavy concentration.

With the caveat that special training can fight these generalizations, which are just that--statistical generalizations validated by a relatively small handful of peer-reviewed studies.

[Quantess]

7. Why is it "quite astounding"?

Real books are so much easier on the eyes. Reading off a screen is not as comfortable to the eyes.

[CTyankee]

10. My eye doc says he's seeing more cases of blepharitis in younger patients

than he did even 10 years ago. He blames the computer screen. I asked him what the difference was between a screen and a printed page to the eyes and he had a long explanation. Basically, the eye experiences a different sensation when reading off a screen compared with a printed page.

[Quantess]

11. I'm no eye doctor, but it's pretty obvious my eyes react differently to a screen.

It feels jumpier, to put it in layperson terms. Real books (preferably with a nice, large font on quality paper) is relaxing to read.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

8. Hooray for print!

I tried the ebook thing. It didn't catch on for me. I much prefer the real thing.

[CTyankee]

9. In college, I loved the library. I loved the beautiful wood card catalogue

with drawers of cards in alpha order so you could find the book you needed to do research. It seems so antiquated now but I enjoyed just opening them up and finding what I needed.

I'd love to take my granddaughters to a library that has one and see what their reaction is...