Comparing Reading Onscreen and in Hard Copy
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Comparing Reading Onscreen and in Hard Copy" by Abbey Becker gave me some hope that books will not be totally extinct as the age of technology continues to grow. Her findings that students may prefer the hard copy to online reading really hit home with me. My daughter's syllabus listed Pride and Predjudice as one of the novels she needed to read this year. She decided to add it (for Free) to her Kindle Library. Love it when she saves me money! Anyway, as the class begins to work on assignments and dissect the novel, she requested the hard copy version because "she was wasting time trying to align the pages of the Kindle with the points that were being made in class and found it difficult to find, hightlight and note the points quickly enough." We ended up buying the hard copy version so she could move more quickly and make notes on the pages.
The distraction issue was not an problem for her but it was for me. I added Alan November's book for class to the Kindle. As long as I had the Kindle I was fine but reading on the PC ended up being more difficult than I expected since I felt the need to multitask as Becker mentioned.
What are your personal preferences? As technology grows will we fine tune our skills of reading onscreen?
Mary Ellen, I find you are correct. When reading for fun, I use my IPAD. I find it hard to use it for school because I like flipping back and forth through the pages. Like anything, technological text is going to take some getting use to but also some fine tuning. I have a highlighter app on my IPAD. However, in order to highlight something I have to copy and paste it in a PDF. This is not too hard if I am reading at home but if I was to be doing this at school within a class it would be time consuming and I would miss the important information.
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