Reading texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension [pdf] (2012)
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On a personal note, I am one of those people who highlights sections of text books using different coloured markers and scribbled notes on the margins. During my final exam time, my revision of materials was very efficient. I am not sure how to teach my kids these skills.
On this topic, computers are great to make flashcards. Instead of the paragrahed notes, when learning material, I am taking note in the form of short Q&A using markdown flashcards. Works great for me. Easy to review efficiently, easy to extend.
This said, I am not sure this is adapted to kids. Hope you share your skills to your kids.
I recently went back to school and started using Zotero again. Reading and annotating books and papers on iPad, and then having access to all of my notes when writing on desktop is such a simple but amazing feature.
My PDF are managed by Calibre, but I export various subsets to the file system, so I can find them easily (on the network).
Ever had the experience that your favorite shoes or watch is discontinued by the manufacturer? It sucks because you’re back on the consumer treadmill again, wasting time and money on things that aren’t as good and struggling with an annoying distraction that previously did not exist while you try to find something that works for you again.
Software churn is just like this, only much worse. It should/could have been different, but it’s not.
So no, I don’t really think we should take away all books, buttons, and knobs that offer a reasonably consistent user experience and replace everything we can with software and tablets. At least not until software learns to behave. Reading is as basic as tying your shoes. Would you really want SV PMs in charge of revolutionizing the shoe-tying experience every quarter, or dropping updates on you that change the place you’ve always stored your shoes?
It was perfectly fine, I loved it. It worked very well.
They took it away, now I have to re-learn how to do it what I already knew with somethibg that I also have to pay for.
Sometimes we should just keep things as they are and stop looking for the next thing.
Further, does anyone believe that pdfs are going to fix something like textbook costs? You will still pay too much for something that you don’t really own now and cannot share or loan out, etc. Savings for the publisher or distributor cabals are not going to find their way to end users, or if they do then this will certainly be a temporary situation. They already know how much they can charge and get away with it, so…
I’m far from a Luddite, but just know that tech is great to the extent that it gets out of the way and lets us focus on things we care about. Corporate tech is the opposite though, because it always wants engagement, feeding, maintenance. PDFs and chrome books that empty out your backpack might look like a convenience for students but who really benefits? The people that push Chromebooks get a captive audience of tax payers and children who are future android fans, the distributors that can empty their warehouses and fire a forklift driver, etc.
Business as usual.. everyone should think critically about it when someone is telling them “these changes are for your own good”.
I'd consider just using the campus printer to print whatever material you need. Or borrow the books from the library.
Every one of us has slightly different memorization / comprehension techniques to grok foreign text and concepts within, and this crappy cheap new tech diminishes most of them. For quick overview why not, but for deeper studies this is bad, very bad.
Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently and even here on HN many celebrated is as some sort of progress, so manufacturers aligned and are happy to save on better quality controls to keep their margins fat and juicy. Who cares about some focus or safety or long term reliability studies, look at that shiny glaring screen!
Do they? Why are physical controls back?
It seems like car manufacturers just mindlessly jumped on what they thought was a fad, without ever bothering to test out their own cars.
And it is not as if physical controls are ipso facto better. I have driven a number of cars with physical controls that are hard to find and distinguish between, and which function modally.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say with the 'just' there - if they were ipso facto better, that would be about as strong an affirmation of their superiority as one could make.
Nothing I wrote contradicts the claim that a well-designed manual control is better than a touch control, and that is, in fact, a view that I agree with. The fact, however, that I have increasingly come across manual controls having the very vice that you seem to be alluding to - one needs to visually find them, operate them, or check their status, taking one's eyes off the road - shows that they are not ipso facto better.
Are you perhaps mistaking ipso facto for prima facie?
It's a very common pattern in English. "Not just X, Y" means that X is true, Y is true, and Y is a stronger claim than X.
He's saying that not only is it the case that physical controls are superior by virtue of being physical controls, it's also the case that that fact is amply documented by "decades of studies".
What groby_p wrote is this: "Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better, there's decades of studies to support that." In the first (independent) clause, groby_p asserts that physical controls are superior as a direct consequence of being physical controls (when one says something is 'not just' true, one is saying (ipso facto!) that it is true.) This, however, is empirically false - a badly-designed physical control can be at least as bad as a touch control (and for an example of how it could be dangerously worse than a touch control, take the fuel selector valve in the airplane John Denver crashed, which was difficult to operate in flight without accidentally applying full rudder.) [1]
The dependent clause claims that decades of studies justify the ipso facto claim, but they do not: they strongly support the somewhat lesser (but highly significant) claim that well-designed physical controls are superior (at least in most cases.) This is something I agree with, and nothing I have written suggests otherwise.
As I have pointed out ways in which some physical controls on today's cars are so poorly designed as to have the same significant problems as touch controls, I don't think this is a pedantic point.
Whatever the other trade-offs, you can do all that even more easily with a good PDF application.
You also can open multiple instances of the same book, to have multiple pages open simultaneously.
The Chromebooks, do they have a jack for a second monitor? A good sized monitor could take care of a lot of these problems. Even better would be if they can also put books, pdfs etc. on an iPad for reading.
But, maybe I am just an old guy and this is just because I learnt this way.
Maybe the new generation is learning directly "digital" with other knowledge access mechanisms. For example, I intuitively store a "position" in the book, maybe they intuitively remember a "keyword" to search for in the book.
There are good PDF viewers (e.g. MuPDF), where you need only a minimum of movements for going to a page, e.g. pressing "719g" in order to go to page 719.
Even when a PDF file does not have bookmarks and even when I do not remember the exact page where something is located, I can still know for instance that what I am looking for is about 20% before the end of the book, so if the book has 1400 pages I go quickly to page 1120 and I search around.
With a good PDF viewer I can navigate through a book much faster than I can turn the pages in a physical book.
Nevertheless, one needs to have a big high-resolution monitor in order to come close to the quality of a printed book. The current 4k monitors are a huge progress over the older 1080p or 1440p monitors, but their resolution is still insufficient to match that required to render correctly some of the typefaces that were popular for high-quality printing (but which have been rarely used after the transition to digital typefaces, being replaced by others more tolerant to low-resolution rendering).
Because I read a lot of books, there are almost 10 years since I have last used a display with a resolution less than 4k and I have always used them only at their native resolution. I cannot understand why some people choose to use various scaling methods to make the text big enough (but ugly), instead of doing the right thing, i.e. the rendering of all typefaces at the maximum available resolution, but choosing their dimension in points big enough for comfortable reading (after setting the monitor dots-per-inch value to the true value for the connected monitor).
I really hate those who provide some technical documentation in HTML format, without offering a PDF alternative, or at least some other worse format, like EPUB, but which still allows a book-like navigation.
Even on the small display of my phone I still prefer to read books in PDF format, if the reader provides a good UI for pan and zoom, than to read reflowable HTML documents, because with the latter the unpredictability of the layout messes with my ability to remember the location of the information of interest, which is essential when I frequently have to navigate through very long documents.
Panning in two dimensions is very cumbersome and brutally inefficient compared to scrolling in just one direction, especially if you have to much of it. If you can only fit a few lines of readable text on your screen at a time, it's really painful to pan across a fixed layout.
(It's been my experience that PDFs are generally not as helpful to accessibility tools as HTML or similar formats can be, as well.)
All of this is exacerbated on displays with slow redraw as well, like e-ink. In the end, I don't even attempt to read comic books or fixed-layout textbooks on my e-readers, for instance. Nobody makes color e-readers big enough for me to read those things comfortably. And my vision is still pretty good— I don't necessarily use fullscreen zoom every day at work and I can still drive.
> the unpredictability of the layout messes with my ability to remember the location of the information of interest
Although technically the layout is fixed, navigation of fixed-layout zoom can itself feel quite unpredictable if you are also using fullscreen zoom, because now you have two layers of independent 2D panning, and all the while your viewport is only a fraction of the screen (in some cases even just 10% of it or much less). At that point, if you're looking at text, you can't see literally any UI elements, just the text. No display corners, no window borders, no title bars, no menu bar, no start menu. All of that spatial positioning you like to navigate by becomes state you have to keep track of in your head, your view of which is updated infrequently at best and only ever partially.
There's also nothing in principle stopping you from using a layout-preserving zoom on reflowable pages. Chrome and Firefox both support this, for instance. By the same token and without loss of generality, you're perfectly free to fix your browser's zoom level and your browser window's size in pixels. It's also trivial to convert HTML to PDF with any of a number of free tools that are easy to get. In contrast PDFs often make spatial navigation the only possible way to navigate, and converting the other way is much harder.
All that said...
> I really hate those who provide some technical documentation in HTML format, without offering [alternatives]
I completely agree with this. Accessibility is intimately related to flexibility, hackability, and ultimately, freedom. Docs should be provided in a way that doesn't assume or support only one way of reading/browsing/working.
I have a pet peeve kinda similar to your complaint, too: I hate it when tools have HTML docs (or even just READMEs or usage messages) but no manpage. Other formats often come in handy for me, too, but I want to be able to view the docs where I'm already using the tool, dammit!
I'm doing this with man pages today but as LLMs get better solving this kind of search problem seems like a major application
It wouldn't seem hard to add to a PDF reader ...
I can fold or flip a page so, that I can quickly view certain parts of the second page while I read the first one.
> switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on.
Any PDF reader I've used will do those things, iirc.
> I can fold or flip a page so, that I can quickly view certain parts of the second page while I read the first one.
With PDFs, you can open it in as many windows as you like and arrange them for simultaneous viewing on your screen. Open a copy on another device too if you like.
I'm not saying books have no advantage, just not for those functions IMHO.
I was told off for it often, but I don't think I would have liked math as much as I did if I didn't have that option.
It's just unwilling to learn/change.
Saw an Audi today which is same physical size and price range to a Tesla model 3. It was down right funny how much useless crap it has on the dashboard, how bad it looks and how claustrophobic it feels compared to model 3.
What happened to the field of ergonomics? Why is the modern/digital world so disconnected from the human form and the way people actually work and use things?
Modern electronics is rife with this shitty ergonomics, it's everywhere—from rotten screen GUIs (or GUIs that change with every release—witness Microsoft Windows) to pushbutton volume controls with little or no tactile feedback instead of proper rotary potentiometers, and so on.
I know in many instances it's cheaper but a rotary potentiometer is cheaper than a screen. A rotary knob for a volume control is much easier to use—and much safer too when used in a vehicle.
I've come to the conclusion that designers of digital electronics simply don't know enough about analog electronics and or analog interfaces to design the stuff, it seems the word 'analog' has been stricken from their vocabulary, and or they're too timid to attempt such designs. Perhaps they're frightened of being criticized by colleagues who are even more stupid than they are.
What else can it be? The human hand is exquisitely designed to rotate a knob (evolution suggests we humans evolved thus to twist fruit off trees).
Same issue with pushbutton switches, without decent tactile feedback one's never sure if the function has been completed. Gamers use proper mechanical switch keyboards because they can achieve much, much greater speed and precision than they can with this crappy 'lifeless' stuff.
The modern electronic junk is just so much harder to use, product design has actually gone backwards. The ergonomics of old-fashioned radios and HiFis were perfect in this regard with their rotary potentiometers and clunky switchs.
If you are a designer of this junk and reading this then shame on you! Ask yourself why the hell are you so incompetent that you cannot give users designs that they both want and are easy to use.
Purely analogue controls like potentiometers went out of fashion because controlling for things like judder, slight creep, dead-zones, and of course physical wear and tear were big enough problems. Case in point: even the cheapest new joysticks for flight simulators have moved to Hall effect sensors, and many knobs have moved to rotary detented encoders.
This change happened in real jet airliners too. A press of the rudder pedal or a swing of the joystick/yoke no longer directly pulls on cables and pulleys to directly manipulate control surfaces. Instead, nearly all modern jet airliners use fly-by-wire where control deflections are encoded, and sent digitally to hydraulic actuators on control surfaces.
Hence, UX designers and engineers could still make analogue-like controls with switches, knobs, physical push-buttons, etc and still have a digital back-end. In fact this is exactly what car manufacturers did in the mid-2000s to late 2010s, with the CAN bus and all. Controls were physical, but a shift of the knob to the previous or next detent would trigger an electromagnetic switch of some sort to send a digital signal instead of relying on the physical position of the knob.
I'd say ~2020 and the W223 Mercedes-Benz S-class was the turning point for extravagantly and pointlessly large screens in cars.
It lets them compress the development timeline. With a potentiometer you need to figure out where it's going to go, how to install it, how to replace it, etc.
With a digital screen, the hardware design is "screen goes here", and most of the hardware issues are moved to the screen manufacturer, while the presentation layer can be changed whenever, and even updated after the car is sold.
This also means less testing is needed, since any major oops can be done with a software patch, which is cheaper than a hardware fix.
The "reading" was basically a bunch of mandatory checkbox exercises that turn into a slog through a bunch of slow-loading prompts that were just "Click Next" to receive confirmation that I had read the info in the prompts.
Absolutely miserable experience all around.
On one hand, I remember how costly textbooks were and I'm glad he doesn't have that. But I still have some of my student textbooks and its interesting to flip through them and see old margin notes, and consider what has and hasn't changed over thirty years.
I went to a store and bought the previous older edition of the textbook which was still the same material but without the fad of making everything visually distracting. It is very refreshing to just be able to read a normal flat white page with normal black, blue and red ink.
We are not alone in that. My wife has some reference books in Chinese that I believe date from the 80s. They are printed on some rather cheap materials. She was trying to find some new ones--and has failed completely. I can't read them, let alone evaluate the usefulness, but she was appalled at what she found and continues to use her taped-together stuff.
[1] "Effects of Physical Activity on Motor Skills and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: A Systematic Review" (2017) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2017/2760716
But yes, trying to help someone with anything computer related when they're on a crappy laptop display is... trying.
In Sweden, based on similar results sub-notebooks and tables that were only recently introduced were removed again. I respect the Swedish for reacting on the new evidence instead of being in denial that the purchase of so much hardware was a mistake.
I write, read, and review scientific papers throughout the year, and most of the time, I will print them out (sometimes over one hundred pages for a single conference - e.g. 10 papers a 10 pages). The clearest benefit is reading mathematical formulae on paper vs screen, from my subjective experience, but also the ability to scribble notes, turn back the page to re-read something to double-check without much effort.
As much as I like computers, paper is the most ingenious medium ever invented by humankind, and the second most durable w.r.t. long-term preservation of the written word (after parchment).
I agree 100%. The simple act of turning back the page/pages is so fast and efficient. My brain seems to even remember where on the page the info I want is. So much more is visible in a single 'eye-shot'. I don't get that same mental experience with e-docs - not sure why. I did grow up with paper so there is a bias.
On the other hand, being able to search is invaluable, as is the ability to have the footnote pages open in a separate window, if the software does not provide a better option. Finally, I can't imagine a good interface that is not pencil-like for sketching diagrams.
And clay tablets.
I've tried figuring out how to get the best of both worlds, but maybe you really just need to decide which trade-off to go with.
It's not great, but it's improving searchability quite a bit.
The screen would also benefit from something I have never seen used: Have a second window that shows whatever images, graphs etc (pretty much anything that's not just words in a row) are relevant to whatever is currently displayed in the main window.
I won’t bother printing some programming language documentation and I miss the ability to search through text in printed books.
That being said, printed books smell good, and I enjoy the typographic excellence of them every time I grab a real book.
Hah: “The students were randomized into two groups, where the first group read two texts (1400–2000 words) in print, and the other group read the same texts as PDF on a computer screen.”
Maybe they should try the experiment again using a non-hostile format for presenting information on a computer.
(In case anyone else was wondering about resolution, this 2012 study used 15” LCDs at 1280x1024 running Windows XP - so definitely not retina.)
For example, people spent hours exploring wikipedia, this could never be done with physical paper. I often find myself looking for Ctrl+F button holding a book. Interactive textbooks were posted on HN many times, like you can alter a numerical input and see graphs chaning in real time. This helps a lot for kids with limited imagination.
These days I can't live without an AI assistant. While reading, it's just so convenient just to ask. The AI might be wrong from time to time, so keep a critical mind, the AI is immensely helpful for foreign-language materials and complex acedemical papers.
I must not understand what you're saying here. I'm envisioning someone reading an article, seeing a reference to something unfamiliar, then stopping to read another article in a nearby source about that thing or any other random topic, recursing for hours. This is easily done, and often was by children a few decades ago, with any encyclopedia set.
I get your point, the problem is that, a good set of encyclopedia is NOT available to every household everytime, it takes lots of space and storage. You can't go to a park with a set of encyclopedia, on the other hand, an iPad with offline wikipedia, navigating by clicking links is much, much easier than stacking many, many opened books on your fixed desk.
I say it all the time: provocative experimental results should be considered fraudulent until the raw data is shared, and then spurious until replicated.
I had long thought that this is because I'm old enough that for a huge portion of my life, most of my reading was on paper and people a generation or two younger than my wouldn't see the same disparity. This paper, however, seems to indicate that this may not be the whole story.
And interestingly, it's specifically handwritten notes in pen. When I use a pencil it's much more like just typing them out.
My colleague swears by her iPad, but I always go the paper route.
Been waiting for 42 inch 8k monitors since 2017. There's a 55 inch IPS on the horizon (ASRock PG558KF).
Does anyone have experience reading text on 8K VA panels like Samsung QN700B?
This machine has one 27" monitor that I frequently use for games, video etc, but that's pretty much all I use it for, rarely do I do text based things on it.
As a first guess I would say:
* “Paper like” looks, including slightly blurred text (since e-ink pixels aren’t square)
* Mostly reflective lighting and softer lighting when backlit
* Dedicated and simple UI
* Perhaps most importantly singly consumable, individual and discrete chunks of readable text
Are all factors in making this a better experience. E-pubs that can reflow their text and so that each “page” is rendered legibly and in full are great experiences. Reading fixed format PDFs is better than on a tablet but not as good as an epub
I know some people despise 60Hz screens because they're too slow and they notice the flickering.
In terms of comprehension the hierarchy probably goes paper > e-ink > all other screens. Hard to quantify the gap between each.
I think this is a big point to consider: we've known for a long time that taking notes increases recall to a degree that likely dwarfs this screen vs paper thing. There are studies where it's like a 7-8x improvement in recall which is tied to comprehension.
So if you want to actually remember and learn from stuff, definitely take notes. Preferably handwritten ones. Preferably do it all on paper. But the key is really to just be taking notes.
Lastly there is also the argument that doing anything is better than nothing. Some people aren't going to get through any books at all if they're not audiobooks, so, they should keep on listening to audiobooks, even if comprehension or recall might not be as good that way. Personally I've been on a hardcover books kick recently, I've found I just get a lot of satisfaction out of reading a proper, high quality hardcover book from start to finish, alone or with a loved one, preferably with a cup of tea, so that's what I'm now doing.
Bit of anecdata that agrees with you here - a few years back I bought a decent colour e-ink android tablet (Onyx Boox). My intent was that I was going to totally use it for reading through journal papers without needing to print them out, regular ebook reading, etc etc.
The VAST MAJORITY of what I have used it for, to date, is the note taking app. Like, not notes scribbled over whatever I'm reading.. just notes.
The act of doodling notes in meetings and training and classes and when problem-solving definitely aids my [lack of] working memory and I definitely see how making notes improves comprehension.
I bought a book replacement and it became a notepad replacement :)
I too have found myself preferring a good solid actual book when it comes to reading, too. Ebooks just miss something tactile. I suppose that highlights when reading becomes an activity with intent, as opposed to something you feel you have to do.
For example, when I was in university (2015-20), all my lecture notes were available as pdfs, but I would just always print them anyway while the other students would read them on their devices. And when I learned French, I only bought physical books and never even once tried an e-reader. Paper is just easier to understand!
That’s about the usable area of a 27” monitor after all the UI trash has taken its share of space.
And of course, it leaves my monitor free for practicing whatever it is I’m trying to learn from the book. Alt tabbing is a terrible experience comparatively. Glancing at the text takes the time of a saccade and uses visual memory, leaving my short term memory free for concepts and working memory.
Obviously get a good book holder that you can stand next to your monitor(s).
E-readers like the remarkable are getting closer, but that one's banned by some of our clients until they hire someone who understands security.
I wonder if any followup studies have been done on this.
"Paper-based reading yields better comprehension outcomes than digital-based reading."
The answer, as is with everything, was N=42
:-)
Kids today!
At work and home, with 4k monitor, it's so much easier to put multiple reading materials side by side and read / research across.
In 2012, even on the state of the art computer systems, the reading experience wasn't as good as it is now.