The Impact of E-Readers on Reading Habits

Part 2: More Interesting Findings

While the available scattered anecdotes lack the desirable rigor to support unquestionably the trends they suggest, there were a large number of extremely interesting comments found over the course of research that bear mentioning.

A Number of Compelling if Ultimately Uninvestigatable Phenomena

The first comes from Nielsen’s speed study. While people said that, during the twenty minute periods for which they were tested, they liked the tablets as much as real books, they still felt more relaxed when reading the real books. What exactly was going on would not have been as clear had they not included PC’s in the tests, i.e. just had people read things off a regular computer. The people who did said that the PC consciously reminded them of work. I would hypothesize that the tablets also made people think of work, if perhaps unconsciously, and that’s what got in the way of the relaxation. (As well as other things, but those in a moment.)

My conjecture (while it is precisely that) is that “relaxing” isn’t really the core of all of this. Being able to relax has to do with not needing to worry about other things while you’re doing something. The PC was simply a psychological reminder of work on this front (although possibly and understandably an inherently inferior setup for reading as well), and kept people’s nerves on inefficient edge. Which MIGHT be what’s going on with the tablets as well (although of course computers must be psychologically associated with everything now) but the point there is really to come to the fact that focus is extremely sensitive. Which in turn leads to the incredibly important point that

the Big Difference Between Tablets and Dedicated E-Readers

is the internet. Not screen resolution, not colors, not reading software or font-adjustment capabilities. If it turns out that it’s unequivocally better to read on a shiny colorful background (iPad-y) than a matte grey one (Kindle-y) then the necessary adjustments will be made to the device that needs to catch up. But there will still be a significant difference in experience between the www-connected device, and the one that is not; and that will be propensity for distraction.

Consider the research on “flow,” the cognitive state in which you get deeply absorbed in a task. Such as reading. Flow is extremely powerful, and the subject of a large amount of research, a substantial and influential amount of which has to do with coding. But it applies to everything that requires hard concentration. “Lost in a book” is a common phrase; that’s “flowing”. But the thing about flow is that it can take a full quarter hour to get in to, and the focus can be broken in an instant. As is demonstrated by simple but important arithmetic, an eight-hour day is only 32 fifteen-minute segments. Meaning if you’re interrupted 32 times a day, you will never get one instant of that intense concentration. Which might seem like a lot, but how many emails do you get daily? And more importantly, because this can be just as disastrous: how often do you THINK about checking your email? Or your texts, or your I don’t know what else, facebook messages, LinkedIn — links, what have you. And how much more likely are you to be thinking about them when you’re staring at the device on which you check them. The flow is too easily diverted.

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