Can a Kindle Help Keep You Reading?

As promised in my earlier post today, I also want to post something positive about e-reading. While digital reading and e-readers may not be best for young readers, they can actually help some adults become better readers.

Such was the experience of Alan Jacobs, as he describes it in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford, 2011). In a section headed by the words “True Confessions”, Jacobs tells about how he came to use and came to love to use his Kindle. It happened in a book store, as he sat down with arms full of books – large books, with small print – good books he wanted but didn’t have room for at home without giving up other books.

So he bought a Kindle. And he discovered that it not only solved his immediate space and storage issues, but also helped keep him reading. Here’s his story and explanation, something perhaps you can relate to as well.

And that’s how the Kindle worked for me when I first got it, and for the most part still works today: it kept me reading. Think how easy it is, and how tempting, when you’re reading a novel to look ahead to the end. Maybe you just want to see how many pages there are in the book, to know how much you have left to read – but, of course, you might just sneak a peek at the last paragraph while you’re at it. You can do this on the Kindle, but it’s difficult. Similarly, when reading many different kinds of books you might want to take a look at the table of contents, to check how many chapters there are, whether they have titles, what the titles might mean, and so on – and again, you can do that on the Kindle, but only by moving your hands in a different and less natural way than you employ to turn the pages as you follow an argument or narrative (81).

And then Jacob’s goes on to state:

In short, once you start reading a book on the Kindle – and this is equally true of the other e-readers I’ve tried – the technology generates an inertia that makes it significantly easier to keep reading than to do anything else. E-readers, unlike many other artifacts of the digital age, promote linearity – they create a forward momentum that you can reverse if you wish, but not without some effort (81).

To which he adds these thoughts yet:

I don’t think that e-readers are going to be a cure-all for everyone in need of cultivating better and longer attention. But I do think that my experience suggests it’s not reasonable to think of ‘technology’ – in the usual vaguely pejorative meaning of that word – as the enemy of reading. The codex [book] itself is a technology, and a supremely sophisticated one, but even digital electronic technologies vary tremendously: e-readers are by any measure far less distracting than an iPad or a laptop. It’s at least possible for new technologies to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem (82).

What You Need to Know Before Letting Your Kids Read E-Books

What You Need to Know Before Letting Your Kids Read E-Books | TIME.com.

The results of this research should not be altogether surprising, but it is interesting and we ought to pay attention to this “downside” of e-reading, especially for children.

Though I have gathered some free Kindle children’s books – especially for the graphics, I might add – I have not used any of them yet with my grandchildren. I prefer to read to them out of traditional books, and I think they would agree – especially the books that are illustrated well. They do like pictures (and so do I!). That’s simply the nature of their age at present.

But, you see, I want them to associate those pictures with text on a page, with part of a story, and therefore with a physical book, not a device that is a distraction. They associate tablets with video games and videos, not reading. And that is fine with me. It’s books and stories I want them to love, not a tablet and apps. 🙂

On the other hand, for adults the experience of reading e-books can be different. Look for my post tonight from Alan Jacobs about the benefits he gained from e-reading.

Here is part of the report on children and e-reading. I regret that the Time.com link is no longer good and that the rest of this research report seems to be private (I had saved this last Fall and assumed the link would still be there; lesson learned.). But there is enough here to get the gist of the report.

Could e-books actually get in the way of reading?

That was the question explored in research presented last week by Heather Ruetschlin Schugar, an associate professor at West Chester University, and her spouse Jordan T. Schugar, an instructor at the same institution. Speaking at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia, the Schugars reported the results of a study in which they asked middle school students to read either traditional printed books, or e-books on iPads. The students’ reading comprehension, the researchers found, was higher when they read conventional books. In a second study looking at students’ use of e-books created with Apple’s iBooks Author software, the Schugars discovered that the young readers often skipped over the text altogether, engaging instead with the books’ interactive visual features.