Interesting tidbit, in the sentence in the article " To explore these patterns further, we conducted three studies that explored college students' ability to comprehend information on paper and from screens."

"Three studies" is linked to a single study, not three. The study is on the site tandfonline.com (Taylor and Francis), where you have to pay to read the study.

Also interesting is that Taylor and Francis, on their website taylorandfrancis.com, says "Taylor & Francis Group publishes books for all levels of academic study and professional development, across a wide range of subjects and disciplines."

So long story short, this is a study saying that books are better, that's on a site who's main business is publishing books. Not saying the study is inaccurate, but I find an article, about how books are better, on a book publishers site, somewhat suspect.

I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that?

Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital books can offer.

Once you bring in these advantages, I bet the pedagogical advantages will be enormous. I'd like to see that study, and I bet digital books will blow everything out of the water.

There are advantages apart from learning benefits. Errata can be a thing of a past with updatable textbooks. You can search for every single word easily and save time. There's no wear and tear. Students can get away with having textbooks on their phones, avoiding carrying textbooks weighing several pounds. Another huge benefit is accessibility. From large font to audio output, all accessibility features ever possible on a computer are possible with the textbook with minimal effort.

The publishing industry is only limiting itself because any innovation on its digital books will mean death of its money maker. It will mean much less production and distribution costs which will put in question its atrocious pricing.

> There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless.

There are also practical considerations.

I much prefer physical textbooks but their bulk presents an issue. It's not fun hauling around one tome per class. I remember back in high school my backpack weighed 30+ lbs.

Last year I bought a 12.9 iPad pro as a textbook replacement. It works great (still miss the physical paper though). It has also greatly reduced the amount of weight on my shoulders during my bike commute to and from school. Nowadays I only carry my laptop and my tablet in my backpack.

Goodnotes can handle huge PDFs and enables me to write on and highlight the text. Voice Dream Reader is a great app to help slog through boring reading (Salli is the best voice I've found so far for scientific lit). I don't use Kindle-like ebooks for textbooks. Similar to what u/acconrad said, I need to be able to write on the text.

With all that in mind, my iPad pro is a designated READING device. I have notifications aggressively disabled for pretty much every app. No Facebook social media apps allowed. I won't/can't even log into Facebook on my web browser (someone else manages my password).

I don't know if this really matters when it's horrible vs slightly less horrible...

It's like you pay hundreds of dollars for a textbook on a subject that hasn't changed in generations, and it's filled with pictures and diagrams and asides and any other layout doodadery their software can muster, but when you get to the exercises it's a pig's breakfast.

I remember my physics textbook in college was almost $200 ($200 twenty years ago!), I'd grind out the answer with a fair degree of confidence, check the key... wrong!? Then after banging my head against it for hours and giving up, the professor would tell us the next day that the book was wrong.

Next year, we had differential equations. Smaller book, older book, more words, fewer pictures--clear as a bell! Probably learned more physics in a semester of differential equations than a year of physics. Good books make a difference. Unfortunately, the physics book was the rule rather than the exception.

My guess is that this is related to spatial memory. A lot of memorizing techniques somehow use space to anchor memories on; eg the old Greeks used to walk down the city’s main street while rehearsing speeches, and anchoring topics spatially onto the buildings.

A textbook is not exactly a street you are walking down, but it does have a certain physical place for every topic, and our brain can anchor it there, like „let me see, differential equations are in the last third.. ah there is this other topic, I know that diff equations come right after that“.

The fourth reason is that some things can't be measured? That seems suspect. I can think of two seemingly obvious inferences from this study that were not mentioned.

1. Digital devices offer more distractions because unlike a book, you also get a slew of other apps (and the internet) at the touch of a button to distract you. Even if you are iron-willed, an OS update will pop up and break your concentration from time to time, a physical book will never present anything other than what it has already printed for you.

2. Books can be written on. I have a Kindle and I can't imagine reading something like Skiena's Algorithms book on it because the effort to take any kind of useful notes far exceeds that of a physical book. You can write in the margins, comment, highlight, all of which helps solidify your understanding. Kindles and iPads may have those things, but they are likely limited in fashion and not nearly as low of an effort to produce as with a book (unless of course it's rented for the semester and you're prohibited from writing in it).

The idea that scrolling may be jarring enough to hamper reading fits my experience. When I scroll, it doesn't feel like just my browser has to repaint the whole webpage, but it also feels like my brain has to reconstitute the structure of the page via a kind of inverse-repainting, just so that I can reorient my attention, before I can resume it.

In other words, if I

- have a (semantic) pointer to, say, the last word on a line

- am maintaining just the single last word I read in my short-term memory/register

- scroll and then have to look for the line I was just on before I have reoriented myself

then it feels like I have to do a kind of mechanistic attention-interrupt/syscall that locks my conscious interpretation of the text's meaning until I have returned to the index of the text that I was just at. I guess that also explains why sometimes, when I am simultaneously trying to reflect on the text while scrolling, I am significantly less able to do so fluidly, as if there were some underlying deadlock, and more often than not have to repeatedly attempt finding the next line..

But if you hold a book in your hands, there is much less variation in the 'streamed/online/', structural form of the text. More or less, all that my brain knows it needs to anticipate is page turning. It can figure out how to cancel out my hand movements, background visual information, surroundings, etc. from my conscious experience because that's what we've evolved to be able to suppress from our attention.

Maybe, then, computer file viewing UIs that have page-flipping skeuomorphisms are less attention interrupting, because they would avoid these interruptions being done more than one time per page/pair of pages?

Link to the mentioned paper: http://www.co.twosides.info/download/To_Scroll_or_Not_to_Scr...

I tend to find there's uses for both physical and digital textbooks;

- Physicals you can spread out, highlight stuff, visually search much fast when you DON'T know exactly what you're looking for, and you can also re-sell them when you're done.

- Digital weighs nothing, is cheaper, you can ctrl-f if you DO know what you're looking for, and often come with tools to bookmark/highlight etc.

Ideally if I'm dropping $100+ on a textbook I'd like to get access to both. If I'm going to a class I'll take the digital one, if I'm sat at home doing research/writing/reading then I'll use the physical one. Also I'm incredibly vain when it comes to my bookshelves, I aim to have enough books for an in-home library by the time I retire.

So I wanted to have a look at the studies they did. One would cost me $36 dollar to see, the other $42 for 24 hour access and $102 for 30 days access.

tl;dr you don't want me to read your research.

I didn't see anything about eink screens in that article except a mention that they exist.

They claim the cost of scrolling is the issue, which is something that I've not seen on an ereader. Page refreshes are a different animal to scrolling, despite the (potentially) distracting flicker they are deterministic: one press is one page. Scrolling is a more analogue interaction, scrolling by one page requires more focus than pressing a button once.

This doesn't really seem to hold much water. For one, the study was done on college undergrads, a non-randomly selected group who have crossed a certain bar for basic comprehension (looks like the researchers are from the U of Maryland, a major university, so you can expect that the students on average will have well above-average reading comprehension compared to the rest of the world).

On top of that, as a former K12 educator, the tools matter far less than the teacher implementing them and the fidelity of execution, very little of which seems to be explored by this study. I don't think digital texts or computers in classrooms are a panacea for what ails our classrooms or that digitizing textbooks is even that exciting when it comes to EdTech -- it's just taking a 19th century tool and digitizing it. This study, however, does not effectively demonstrate that either medium is better than the other, but the Ed world is in desperate need of strong research in that regard, specifically in the efficacy of EdTech in the classroom.

Assuming the discrepancy cannot be solved by simply carrying around a notepad to write with whenever you are reading something you want a deeper understanding of, the digital medium offers many benefits in my opinion that make it better overall.

I cannot stand reading on a white background for long periods of time. If I had to deal with a white background I simply would not read as much. Being able to change both font size and type is also useful because publishers do not always make a sane choice for you.

Above all, I think price is the best reason. You might be able to get away with charging $100+ dollars for a printed book but you cannot do that with printed books, therefore book prices have to come down.

Even if there actually is a loss in comprehension when actively reading and not just passive reading, the overall benefits of reading more whether its because you can now buy more books due to the lower prices or because you can change the color/text to suit your taste has to outweigh the benefits offered by printed books.

I found these bullet points from the article pretty insightful:

> - Reading was significantly faster online than in print.

> - Students judged their comprehension as better online than in print.

> - Paradoxically, overall comprehension was better for print versus digital reading.

So with digital reading, you feel like you've learned more than print, but you've actually learned less. This seems pretty dangerous.

> In our academic lives, we have books and articles that we regularly return to. The dog-eared pages of these treasured readings contain lines of text etched with questions or reflections. It's difficult to imagine a similar level of engagement with a digital text.

Is it? I read nearly exclusively on my kindle for exactly the opposite reason. I find it much easier to keep highlights and notes, then quickly return to them. And the note taking technology on the kindle is crude. Imagine if it was an _actually_ good experience? If note taking were easier (typing is painful). If the data were free (to be shared with other services). If it were easy to connect with others taking notes on the same topics, at the same time? If clicking on an image of a map made it interactive. There are so many possibilities, most of them untapped. I miss reading things on paper. But if our technology were to improve to half of its potential, I'm not sure I would.

How big was this study? Did they test how well the students performed when they had to search for information?

They say that the students read much faster on the screen. What if they just slow down a bit?

The textbook industry is corrupt and will believe or promote anything to try to hold on to profits.

Wasting all of that paper and making people lug around a bunch of heavy books is asinine.

A big plus that is still kind of yet to be realized is the increase in utility of notes taken on a device. I like to jot notes in the margins of books and papers while I'm reading, but I almost never go back and look at them. Every once in a while I'll end up searching trying to find where I wrote my note, and usually can never find it.

Recently I have started using Apple Pencil, Apple's Notes app and iBooks to read and jot down ideas. Apple's Notes app already supports searching for handwritten notes, and I hope that soon iBooks can support searching for handwritten notes in PDFs. These apps combined with Spotlight really increase the value of notes + a collection of books/papers, as it turns your device into kind of a personal database.

This is a halfway decent article from Business Insider.

I find myself 50/50 on this issue. When I need cutting edge info, or niche info, I typically read it on a screen.

When I need offline info, or low power info, or simply a different aesthetic for some reason, I love a nice book. Especially for older info.

Surprisingly, discovery of info is pretty boundless and fun at a large University library, because books are sorted by topics. I don't need to endlessly query Google for the most authoritative resources.

Personally I really feel we need both sources of info. Both types of print have pros and cons.

I don't know if I "perform" better with one type of print though.

"Better" is very subjective, and when I was in college in 2010-13, all of my tests were written paragraphs/essays. Totally subjective.

For me it’s the medium itself. eBooks are ok if they’re short or fiction, but for heavy duty reading, I need a wide spread, and I need to be able to annotate and flick through fast, either to preview or jump to another section. Can’t do all that on a digital device.

I believe it. Learning how to operate a machine to control what gets displayed is such a distraction, in and of itself. Endless diversions and digressions, even if the devic has no internet. Procrastination just explodes exponentially.

This doesn't terribly surprise me, from my own experience. I either print academic journal articles or subscribe to the physical issues, because I found I never fully retained things I read on a screen, either desktop or iPad.

Why are we 10 years into Kindle's evolution and the renderer still does not draw pages exactly the same way every time you load the same page (paginating forward vs. paginating backward, at the same font size)? I have to expect that this will reduce spatial-visual memory where people remember what position a figure or text had on a page versus a better renderer (PDF, though impractical on small screens) or a physical book and I'd like to see a study which distinguishes this effect.

This study does suggest that we are doing web development all wrong and that browser functionality is exacerbating this, instead of scrolling we could be doing something like this: http://www.creativebloq.com/html5/create-page-flip-effect-ht... or using any number of similar solutions in jquery.

As others have mentioned I would assume distractions have something to do with it. Whenever I need to learn a new language for work I always opt for a paper copy of a book, and other than photography books those are the only physical ones I have purchased in the last 10+ years. New frameworks obviously I go with a screen as that material changes pretty rapidly, but just baseline getting started with a language, physical book works best for me.

> There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. But there's clearly something important that would be lost with print's demise

The argument put forth in the article is fundamentally flawed. They're assuming that "screens" has a fixed meaning, to mean what it's like now.

But we're actually at very early stages of reading content off screens, and there's a lot of scope of that experience to change in the future. Better displays, better ways to interact with the content, better ways to annotate the content, better ways to deal with distractions on the device, etc etc.

Maybe in the end we'll discover print is definitively better, but we are currently a long way from being able to make that claim.

Seems like there is a deeper discussion going on here. Not only Print Vs Digital, but also open educational materials Vs "History of the World version 324".

I personally prefer printed materials for extended reading, but it is really just a matter of taste. So if we see a study which says "Printed text books are better", it should really add "For SOME PEOPLE". Give students a choice! Give parents a choice!

I recall buying two copies of a 120 dollar book just so my son would not have to lug its 5kg back and forth each day from school. The sheer amount of weight students have to carry is ludicrous. Open educational materials solves so many of these problems.

I'm a software developer and I still find I prefer print over screen, both when engaging in field-specific study or just simply reading for pleasure.

Most of the free tutorials I use are found on websites though so that's how I do most of my learning.

When it comes to tried and tested texts like Pragmatic Programmer, Effective Java, Web Application Hacker's Handbook etc. I will always buy the hard copy textbook and forego the use of the eBook.

I had a Kindle Paper White at one point and while I used it a fair bit when travelling, I still preferred stocking a bookshelf with hard copies for reading at home.

Something about the experience of flipping through pages makes the whole process that much smoother for me.

Physical vs digital copies offer different advantages, and for someone who's serious about mastering the material, it probably makes sense to consider having both.

For overall comprehension, my feeling is that the advantage of physical books is related to spatial memory, and seems related to "memory palace" techniques for memorization. I can physically recall pages of books I've read many years ago, but I really don't get the same thing from a digital copy.

Being able to search within digital copies is a clear advantage. The markup/review software and document management system also makes a huge difference.

Perhaps because screens have endless distractions whereas textbooks do not.

Personally, I prefer to read a paper book any day. It feels infinitely softer on my eyes, and it's just more pleasant of an experience to me for whatever reason.

Overall I would take that study very lightly. They basically took a cohort of student that did not have to read anything meaningful until then. In highschool they may have had some text and some work to do on a laptop, but the bulk of it was paper based. They were also trained to highlight sentences instead of taking meaningful notes.

Train the next generation to mostly use digital and that small study will become a time capsule, which would incidentally be a better outcome that what it is now, i.e. an attempt to generalize a conclusion based on an oversimplistic experimental setup.

I was skeptical about the claim in the title of the article to begin with. Point three and four in the article makes me even more uncomfrotable (for reasons that others have explained much better), and the article leaves a lot to be desired.

A quick Google Scholar of "difference between screen and print in learning" gave me two results that immediately stand out. The first article[1] (2013, n = 72, 10th grade students, reading comprehension of texts between 1400-2000 words, print vs. PDF on computer screens) that the BI article seems to corroborate. The second article[2] (2013, n = 538, university students, textbooks that are learning material for exams, print vs. digital but device type and format available from the abstract) suggests that there is no statistically significant difference between print and screen.

Digging deeper, I found another one[3] article (2015, review/opinion based on existing research), which questions format, design, country and culture amongst other things—some of which have already been questioned in the comments.

The first thing that I find disturbing aboutthis article is that I'm not even trained in the field of education and I could find a lot of information in the literature that seems to suggest that the BI article is highgly opinionated and underpowered.

The second thing that I find disturbing is that the authors of the paper in question themselves wrote that BI article and make sensational assertions with such confidence that is, in my opinion, obviosuly flawed. It's already hard to forgive a reporter sensationalising research results that are not the whole picture, for the authors themselves to do it seems so casually and carelessly seems to be a step up and is, unfortunately, increasingly popular.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512... [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512... [3] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01207678

I can attest to this. I need big pages that I can lay flat on my desk and scribble on with a pencil. Kindle or an LCD screen just doesn't cut it for academic reading.

I like print books with a website offering errata, and some minimalist recorded lectures on the material, like Gilbert Strang writing on a blackboard to further give insight to the book's material.

Even with pdf-tools in emacs, navigating a PDF is still too much wasted time compared to flipping pages plus I have to stare at a screen for hours. The SICP texinfo copy I read being an exception where it was the only time I preferred the digital copy to print.

As a student of Science/Mathematics, I often make the most out of my E-books by writing out the exercises/problems/principles on my notebook and repeating the process (mostly for the Mathematics). I think the flexibility that E-books offer regarding it's digital existence is the pillar of my bias towards eBooks.

Yeah, no shit.

On one hand you have large screens that emit a huge amount of light, posing a huge strain on eyes.

On the other hand you have tiny screens, too tiny to display anything remotely useful, in black and white, and slow to update.

Ebooks for learning will not take off completely until we'll have larger, faster, cheaper e-ink displays.

Nothing about not being able to run other apps/multitask with a book? When i read a book, i cannot turn to page 123 to see who is online or get notifications that i received an email.

Less distractions, more focused, more effectiveness; doesn't really require a study in my opinion.

No students learn from visuals, demonstrations, examples, comparisons, interactive content. Shoving a students head into a dry, dense volume of endlessly tasteless and monotonous text is the problem we've always had, screens or not

Emotion and memory are connected. And emotion is connected with perception and pleausure of senses. All this connections was knows from many centuries in the yoga and meditation practice

It's interesting that students thought their comprehension was better when reading from screens, rather than paper, when in fact the opposite was the case. What might explain that mistaken perception?

It'd be interesting to go into more details:

- what if it's e-ink?

- what if it's paginantes rather than scrolled?

- what if there are multiple screens?

- what if it's a very large screen?

Etc.

There must à factor that matters most than others

But do we need research or study to confirm this? We are community of lifelong learners so we should know better.

maybe the screen is secondary, on a computer it is way too easy to get distracted especially for young learners comparing to a real paper-format book?

our brain might adapt to searching instead of deep-thinking from now on, using all abstracted data sets from big-data-somewhere, which also means, we will lose control and the world will be taken over by AI instead

Ok, suppose this is true, why? It sounds like such nonsense to me, there must be confounders