You know I love my Kindle. I’ve written about it more than once (here and here, for starters). But it has its limits.
It’s not my preferred way to read nonfiction, for example, because I like underlining too much. (I know that I can “highlight” in the Kindle, but it’s not the same.) That particular interface may be better on a Nook or an iPad, but at the end of the day, I’ve had enough of a backlit screen; the Kindle is easy on my tired eyes.
Schools across the nation have begun to use—or are considering the move to use—e-readers in the classroom, and the discussion about this has begun. A recent article by technology/culture writer Nicholas Carr discusses two studies on the way students use books … and e-books. As noted, electronic textbooks have some advantages: they can be easily updated as new information becomes available. (Consider a never-ending history book. Yikes.) Obviously e-books reduce the use of paper, and dozens of textbooks can be carried in one small e-reader, so backpacks will get smaller. (As will backaches.)
But not so fast. Carr says printed books continue to have advantages over digital ones:
People read in a variety of ways. Sometimes they immerse themselves in a book, reading without interruption. Sometimes they skim pages to get a quick sense of the story or argument. Sometimes they search for a particular passage. Sometimes they skip back and forth between two or more sections of a text, making comparisons. And sometimes they take notes or highlight passages as they read.
Because we’ve come to take printed books for granted, we tend to overlook their enormous flexibility as reading instruments. It’s easy to flip through the pages of a physical book, forward and backward. It’s easy to jump quickly between widely separated sections, marking your place with your thumb or a stray bit of paper. You can write anywhere and in any form on any page of a book. You can keep many different books open simultaneously, dipping in and out of them to gather related information. And when you just want to read, the tranquility of a printed page provides a natural shield against distraction.
Not to mention how much it would suck if your e-book battery died or crashed the night you were cramming for an important test. 🙂
UPDATE: There’s more on this subject here.
Tweet: E-book or paper? Give me that old-time paper religion!
Tweet: Printed books continue to have some advantages over digital ones.
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I don’t write in books as a general rule–I find if I mark up passages, even in my Bible, those are the only things I reread. I also was raised on library books and marks on the pages are absolutely verbotten.
But I don’t like how hard it is to retrieve past pages on an e-book. I can never figure out how to relocate things I may want to reexamine, so a text book for me would be difficult.
I like the idea, however, of lightening the backpack load . . .
It’s definitely a conundrum. But the whole thing of having two fingers stuck in a book and flipping back and forth…of having the books open on the table… that really, really resonates with me.
Tho I believe there’s two sides to this argument, I see your side has great merit.
But it depends on how kids use ebooks as texts. Flipping around in a text is painful on Kindle, and I loved to do it in paper and I always got distracted mid-flip and engrossed in an unrelated passager. Kindle gives you keyword searches and if you know to fix in your mind the oddball word(s) in a passage, you can zap to it at lightspeed. Like anything change will be a tradeoff of old and new costs & benefits. Some things we are accustomed to will be hard/impossible, and some things we regarded as unthinkably hard will be simple on Kindle texts.
You’re absolutely right, Steve. I STILL get distracted in mid-passage (although for me that’s led to additional learning).
A generation of students who learn on e-books will no doubt find it more comfortable than we do, although “key-word knowledge” kinda concerns me. Why bother to learn anything if you can just google it? (Sounds like another post.)
Thanks for commenting!