Importance Of Digital Reading And Onscreen Reading

Reading Comprehension and User Preference for Digital Versus Onscreen Reading

“When you’re in the midst of the revolution it’s all but impossible to understand just where you stand.” (Mcilroy 4)

INTRODUCTION

Electronic reading has been available for many decades and has grown increasingly popular through the development of e-books along with advances in technology for user devices. Ivan writes that the “new technologies determine a paradigm shift at the level of reading, through the transition from book to the electronic screen, from the classical reading to the digital reading.” (46) The survival of the traditional print book and the future of the e-book is an area of enormous debate and importance for publishers. The publishing industry

Declaration of Independence and launched Project Gutenberg named after Johanes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press (“Project Gutenberg”). 1998 marks the year that the first dedicated eBook readers, the Soft Book and the Rocket eBook Reader appeared on the market. In 2000, Stephen King’s novella Riding the Bullet was released as a digital-only computer-readable file. The Librie e-reader was released by Sony in 2004 followed by the Sony Reader in 2006. The reading world was forever changed in 2007 with the launch of the Kindle eBook and the Apple iPhone. In 2010 Apple released the iPad and in less than a month the iBookstore sold half a million e-books (“History of

“This creates a particular kind of reading situation, the main characteristic of which is that readers have to constantly make choices by clicking on one button or another to make various units of information appear. Each button, each hyperlink, is thus an invitation to move forward, a promise of content.” (Vandendorpe, Aronoff, and Scott 133) Liu asserts that when engaged in screen-based reading, more time is spent “on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, non-linear reading, and reading more selectively, while less time is spent on in-depth reading, and concentrated reading.”