Electronic Reading - Benefits and Pitfalls

E-readers and electronic texts are relatively popular, with Amazon’s Kindle line of devices and Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader being very common. Apple’s iPads, Google’s Nexus, and other handheld phones and tablets have e-reader options, too, including the Kindle app, available on them. It has been discussed in school board meetings across the United States that we should get rid of paper textbooks and instead invest in e-readers and online textbook options to reduce the cost of having to replace costly texts when they become worn out or outdated. But is this the best answer to the textbook issue?

There are certainly benefits to electronic reading. Cost and money are huge factors when companies and individuals make decisions. When publishers print books, they have to include the cost of paper, ink, and distribution costs into the price of a book. If a book does not sell well, the extra copies of the book get sent back to the publisher or sit on shelves or in warehouses, which is a problem electronic texts will never face. The cost of getting new texts loaded onto an electronic device (once you’ve paid for the initial device) is typically lower than buying a paper-and-ink book. People with visual disabilities can easily change the text size on an e-reader, which is impossible with a printed book. The improving technology means the screens are getting better, so eye strain is less of a problem, battery life is lengthening, and clarity of digital text continues to improve. Overall, there are quite a few positives for e-reading.

However, there are negatives to electronic reading, too. Nicholas Carr, in chapter six of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, argues that there are quite a few downsides to reading online or on electronic devices instead of books. Print books are very linear in nature - start at the beginning and read until the end.  E-books, on the other hand, are somewhat non-linear in their features. You can click on words or links to be taken to different resources, but when you do this, it interrupts your brain’s interaction with the written text. When e-books first became popular, the proponents of the format pointed out the benefit of hyperlinks that could take a reader to a dictionary definition, an encyclopedia article, or other electronic resource while people are reading. However, the devices being connected to the internet actually creates more of a distraction. Choosing whether or not to click on a hyperlink may seem like a mundane task when reading an article or story, but by dedicating some brain processing power to making that decision, you have now taken some of your focus away from comprehending what you are reading, and studies have shown that comprehension deteriorates when there are choices to be made. With connected devices, you can now surf the Internet, click on links, go shopping, or check your email, all while “reading” a book. One person interviewed suggested that e-readers “can help return to us our attention spans and extend what makes books great: words and their meanings.” Mr. Carr followed that quote with a warning from Marshall McLuhan: beware of “the inability to see how a change in a medium’s form is also a change in its content.” Publishers are now considering adding videos, sound effects, and other distractions to electronic books. This will not help us focus on the stories, but instead, they will add to the distraction.

Overall, I see both the benefits and pitfalls of electronic reading. Cost is a huge factor for school districts considering textbook replacement, and many schools are already investing in computers, laptops, or other electronic devices for students, so there is a natural cost-saving interest if cheaper electronic versions of books were available. However, Nicholas Carr would most likely err on the side of printed books having more benefit for students if ease of use and comprehension were considered. There is no question as to how one uses a book. We start at the cover, open the book and read from the beginning to the end. The title and table of contents are in the front, and the glossary and index are in the back. We can use bookmarks or sticky notes to jot down thoughts or questions, but we know how to use a book. Electronic readers are not always as easy to navigate. Student comprehension of text is one of the most important things we focus on in elementary school - how students understand what they are reading. If students were more distracted and had decisions to make that took their focus away from constructing meaning, or as we ask my third graders to do, visualizing the movie in their minds, as they read, we are sacrificing one of the biggest purposes of reading - comprehension and understanding. E-readers do have their benefits, but I will continue to encourage my students and my own children to keep turning those paper pages and watching the movie in their minds.