Books or e-Books?

In just a few years, e-books have come out of nowhere, to become a significant contender for book readers. It’s now a common sight to spot someone staring into their iPad or Kindle—absorbed in reading a book or newspaper. (Although not nearly as common as seeing someone gazing into their smart phone, while texting or repeatedly brushing its screen with a finger.) A Kindle is a great convenience: for the moderate cost of buying one of these reading devices and downloading e-books, one can tote around thousands of books in a thin device weighing a fraction of a pound.

I have purchased a surfeit of books over the years. A significant section of our home has become designated as a library, and yet books still manage to slip off their shelves, sneak into other parts of the house, and cover any available surface they can find. Most of my recently-purchased books contrive clever ways to avoid ever being relegated to those dusty shelves—convincing me that I must read them soon, lest their very existence disappear from memory. These eager books compel me to keep them handy. There are times  when it seems as if they have succeeded in capturing most of our living space for themselves. And I admit to doing little to dissuade them, as I continue to insist on adding to their ranks. 

Yet those folks who carry their own library around on a Kindle intrigue me. Have they truly discovered an improvement over old-fashioned books? Are they not just succumbing to a passing fad? Is this the wave of the future—sounding the death knell of paper books? Should we hold-outs cave in, join the modern world, and trade pressed wood pulp for pressed glass and semi-conductors?

I’ve been pondering this dilemma for some time now, and was given a major boost in dealing with it by a recent article in Scientific American magazine, titled “Why the Brain Prefers Paper,” by Ferris Jabr. The article notes that 20% of all books sold last year were in the forme of e-books. Several scientific studies are cited in this article; which conclude that people have better recall after reading a book, as compared to an e-book. Technology might be changing how we read, but it seems that we can remember what we read better, if we use old-fashioned books. That was an interesting piece of information for me. 

In addition, the article noted, people find it easier to navigate long books on paper. Because an e-book is a seamless stream of words, it’s harder to keep track of where you are, have been, or how much further you have to go. You can’t readily flip back and forth in an e-book—although you can search and skip around quite readily. A paper book also provides you with more varied and familiar tactile items to savor—such as page corners, page thickness, and one’s location within the book. People tend to like that sensation.

One reason why people don’t remember material from an e-book as well as from a paper book, is that it’s easy to become distracted while reading by fiddling with buttons on the tablet. This has been especially noticed with children when adults read to them: they get drawn into watching the bells and whistles and don’t listen as well.

The Scientific American article helps me decide to wait a little longer, before I dive into the e-book arena. To be able to remember what I read is important to me, as the vast majority of my reading material is nonfiction. I am also very liberal in marking up a book—underlining sentences, circling sections, and scribbling comments in the margins. I will sometimes go back over a book after I’ve read it, create an abstract of my scribblings, and summarize it into a computer document—although I then will likely end up printing it out, so as to once again be able to touch those pages and flip through them.

It may not be much longer before I give in and buy a Kindle, but for now I think I’ll hang with paper.