Brilliant work here. I would be curious about your perspective on audio books and how we process that information. My guess is it’s an entirely different point of view.
I tried to listen to an audio book while driving. Once. Never again. The book took too much attention away from driving. I think, however, I could listen to an audio book while, say, dusting or weeding.
I enjoy reading heavy books, mostly history, but also Kindle books and audio books. When I'm tired, I don't track the Kindle text very well. That's when I turn on the audio too and allow the narrator to read it to me while following along. Like a modern day sing along with Mitch. Follow the bouncing ball.
My excuse is that my retina, cataract, and cornea surgeries have changed my ability to read a real book. This article has offered the encouragement I need to keep at it. To put down the Kindle and pick up a book.
I’ve also shifted my reading habits due to eye fatigue and vision issues. I’ve always loved good audio books (Rob Inglis is the voice of Tolkien for me now) but I turn to audio more frequently. Kindle and other digital formats are great for searching, highlighting, and annotating.
I was widowed almost three years ago. What no one tells you is that your attention span and ability to focus/concentrate/remember just goes.
Not being able to hide or lose myself in a book, even in one of my favourites that have been with me for decades, depressed me further.
So I persevered and just over a year ago I was able to read and retain a print book. It's a connection thing. (and all the other bits you so clearly explain). You describe it far better than I could.
Thank you
Thank you for writing this and explaining how are brains are driven one way despite our urge for them to go the other way. I thought it was me, reaching for the easy option (my phone) now I understand 🙂
I am a devoted reader of books, one of the great joys of life. I am saddened that many people seem unable or unwilling to make the effort.
Unfortunately poor eyesight means print books are a challenge so I read on Kindle. It works because you can't check email or decide you suddenly need to look for something online. Still, there is the displacement factor you mentioned. Whether the book is 200 pages or 700 we don't get the sense of the length and our place within it.
I also enjoy audiobooks, which are another form altogether, more like radio theater than a "book" per se. We listen together on long drives, then discuss characters and storylines, making it a rich experience.
While I agree with most of what you said here, I feel the need to defend what I'll call computer-aided books.
First off, I format anything I'm seriously interested in reading into PDF, which retains page breaks and the contextual cues one gets from a physical artifact.
Also, the ability to search is priceless! Of course, it's a skill — try it on the word "the" to see what I mean! I've trained myself to remember unusual words and phrases so I can get back to them as easily as finding the dog-eared page in a physical book. I'll recall that there was some interesting stuff that had the word "saccade" in it, for example. It's like a mental bookmark.
Then, there's the bulk problem. I had a 2,000+ volume library. It took an entire wall of bookcases! It was indexed by ISBN and sorted by DDN — until an ex was diagnosed with a rare cancer, and we had to do a panic move into a step-daughter's sewing room. No room for books, now.
I couldn't GIVE those suckers away! I listed them on all sorts of social media and CraigsList-sort of sites. I hauled them to five different thrift stores. Finally, the central collections depot for Salvation Army took the ~50 boxes of books — I very quickly unloaded them and scooted off before they could change their mind!
So now, I have a soft library over ten times that size on my computer, indexed by ISBN and sorted by DDN in a database, along with abstracts and keywords that I enter. No, I haven't read them all, but I've perused each one long enough to summarize in a searchable abstract.
One side benefit is I've assembled another database of 10,541 notable quotes — many of which were hand-keyed from artifacts, but soft-books makes that a copy and paste. I add things to it at least weekly, often daily.
I find I can recall a notable quote as well as a "the article with the photo of the woman at the top", which itself I recalled from the visual image of "woman at the top" well enough to re-find easily!
THANK YOU, Jan and others for the overview of the benefits of reading on screens. I am so sick of the “screen vs printed page” binary as if the format rather than the intention of the screen user is the critical difference in fragmented attention spans. Scrolling as a physical activity - advancing the text in an ebook or long-form article - and the mental/emotional activity of scrolling, social media, shopping sites, forums, etc. are VERY different uses of text and media, and each impacts attention differently.
Many comments here talk about their physical or vision issues that make reading on screens a far better and easier way to access reading material. In my experience this is no small thing. I have been reading on screens since I was gifted a Kindle back in 2009. Now I have 2 Kindles, Colorsoft and Scribe for annotated note-taking. I also have a Boox for my non-Kindle books. I read books and articles on my iPad and phone occasionally as well. Substack is my only “social media.” My attention span has only expanded as a result of reading on screens. An additional benefit is the ease of lateral reading - linking out from the original text to a reference, term, or concept cited.
I’d love to see more public conversation about fragmented attention as an outcome of CHOICES people make about how, what, and why they engage (or don’t) with text and media in general, and for the attention conversation to get away from the simplistic print vs. screen dichotomy.
And Jan is exactly right about trying to dispose of physical books. 😩
Mind you, I'd rather have physical artifacts, if I had the space and if each one had been scanned and OCR'd and indexed for searching! The "book feel" is indeed special, and I still look an the two boxes of books I allowed myself when I had to get rid of the rest.
I don't like lighted screens. I have several e-ink readers that present an almost paper-like look, and that are extremely easy on batteries. (The real bane of e-books is the energy requirement.)
As far as vision issues go, that is a vote for e-books, no question.
My eyes are in their "extremely late 40s", and reading physical books can require bright lights and magnifiers. With e-books, I simply increase the font size!
In short, a physical book is a horse, and an e-book is an automobile. You don't take your automobile on hiking trails in the woods, and you don't take your horse on a cross-continental trip.
It is not just about using a device to read, rather than a printed book. It is also about setting aside reading time when you are awake enough to concentrate. I try to set aside some time to read during the day and then read for an hour or so. But when I was working that simply wasn't possible. Some people use public transport for reading if they have a reasonably long journey to work. I rode a bike, so that wasn't possible either. Audio books put me to sleep after five minutes.
Can you share references for these claims? I’m not sure the changes in comprehension, reading time, and so on are that consistent across all readers and all works. How humans share and absorb information is always changing. Faster these days, for sure, but I’d not sure I believe all tech is bad and print is always better. I’d love to be able to check references.
I can't speak for the author of course, but I would like to recommend Nicholas Carr's book, 'The Shallows' to you. Carr makes a similar case regarding reading comprehension and uses evidence based in neuroscience to back his claims. It is a well referenced book.
I couldn't even listen to this without having to restart it and reset focus. I have a TBI and I feel like this has been making me feel so overloaded. 🫨🫨
I read almost all books on an eReader. (I have book mold issues.) I always have the lower left of the screen set to say how many minutes are left in the chapter. The lower right tells me how far into the book I am percentage-wise. I dislike reading via eReader for non-fiction where I want to retain facts or insights precisely for what is mentioned in this article. I resort to highlighting these parts and transcribing them as notes later.
Audio-wise, I'm unable to pay attention to fiction audiobooks but can listen endlessly to podcasts of people talking.
I used to read two to three print books a week, since about 1973. So possibly seven thousand books. I’ve had a home computer since 1981 and been on the internet since 1988. So I claim to be one of the first digital natives, my reading speed has always been fast on screen. Certainly the mental models for books exist both for print books and screen books for me. Professionally I read possibly half a million words a day on screen. Around 2014, something changed and my print book reading fell off a cliff. It’s only when I’m working in a bookshop that I read print. This article certainly goes some way towards explaining this for me.
Does any of this change for long-term screen readers. I have MS-related vision problems and have been reading on a tablet for 20 years. I use a tablet with a larger screen than my phone for any lengthy reading. I now have more trouble holding my attention with physical books, than the ebooks. Same for remembering information. The one thing I do miss is what you described as spatial memory -- that feel for just where in the book I read a particular fact or passsage. But I highlight and make annotations and there's always the search function.
Reading most physical books requires using a magnifier and that is distracting. I recently read an article that referenced a book not available as an ebook. I found a used copy and am working with it. I've had to go back to taking notes to hold that I fo.
I love how well this explains what I have been noticing in my own attention experiences.
Brilliant work here. I would be curious about your perspective on audio books and how we process that information. My guess is it’s an entirely different point of view.
I tried to listen to an audio book while driving. Once. Never again. The book took too much attention away from driving. I think, however, I could listen to an audio book while, say, dusting or weeding.
I was wondering about audio books, too!
Many e-book readers still work in page mode rather than scrolling. I would be interested in reading any research on whether this makes any difference.
I enjoy reading heavy books, mostly history, but also Kindle books and audio books. When I'm tired, I don't track the Kindle text very well. That's when I turn on the audio too and allow the narrator to read it to me while following along. Like a modern day sing along with Mitch. Follow the bouncing ball.
My excuse is that my retina, cataract, and cornea surgeries have changed my ability to read a real book. This article has offered the encouragement I need to keep at it. To put down the Kindle and pick up a book.
I’ve also shifted my reading habits due to eye fatigue and vision issues. I’ve always loved good audio books (Rob Inglis is the voice of Tolkien for me now) but I turn to audio more frequently. Kindle and other digital formats are great for searching, highlighting, and annotating.
I was widowed almost three years ago. What no one tells you is that your attention span and ability to focus/concentrate/remember just goes.
Not being able to hide or lose myself in a book, even in one of my favourites that have been with me for decades, depressed me further.
So I persevered and just over a year ago I was able to read and retain a print book. It's a connection thing. (and all the other bits you so clearly explain). You describe it far better than I could.
Thank you
Thank you for writing this and explaining how are brains are driven one way despite our urge for them to go the other way. I thought it was me, reaching for the easy option (my phone) now I understand 🙂
I am a devoted reader of books, one of the great joys of life. I am saddened that many people seem unable or unwilling to make the effort.
Unfortunately poor eyesight means print books are a challenge so I read on Kindle. It works because you can't check email or decide you suddenly need to look for something online. Still, there is the displacement factor you mentioned. Whether the book is 200 pages or 700 we don't get the sense of the length and our place within it.
I also enjoy audiobooks, which are another form altogether, more like radio theater than a "book" per se. We listen together on long drives, then discuss characters and storylines, making it a rich experience.
Scrolling is fun but reading long books is divine.
While I agree with most of what you said here, I feel the need to defend what I'll call computer-aided books.
First off, I format anything I'm seriously interested in reading into PDF, which retains page breaks and the contextual cues one gets from a physical artifact.
Also, the ability to search is priceless! Of course, it's a skill — try it on the word "the" to see what I mean! I've trained myself to remember unusual words and phrases so I can get back to them as easily as finding the dog-eared page in a physical book. I'll recall that there was some interesting stuff that had the word "saccade" in it, for example. It's like a mental bookmark.
Then, there's the bulk problem. I had a 2,000+ volume library. It took an entire wall of bookcases! It was indexed by ISBN and sorted by DDN — until an ex was diagnosed with a rare cancer, and we had to do a panic move into a step-daughter's sewing room. No room for books, now.
I couldn't GIVE those suckers away! I listed them on all sorts of social media and CraigsList-sort of sites. I hauled them to five different thrift stores. Finally, the central collections depot for Salvation Army took the ~50 boxes of books — I very quickly unloaded them and scooted off before they could change their mind!
So now, I have a soft library over ten times that size on my computer, indexed by ISBN and sorted by DDN in a database, along with abstracts and keywords that I enter. No, I haven't read them all, but I've perused each one long enough to summarize in a searchable abstract.
One side benefit is I've assembled another database of 10,541 notable quotes — many of which were hand-keyed from artifacts, but soft-books makes that a copy and paste. I add things to it at least weekly, often daily.
I find I can recall a notable quote as well as a "the article with the photo of the woman at the top", which itself I recalled from the visual image of "woman at the top" well enough to re-find easily!
THANK YOU, Jan and others for the overview of the benefits of reading on screens. I am so sick of the “screen vs printed page” binary as if the format rather than the intention of the screen user is the critical difference in fragmented attention spans. Scrolling as a physical activity - advancing the text in an ebook or long-form article - and the mental/emotional activity of scrolling, social media, shopping sites, forums, etc. are VERY different uses of text and media, and each impacts attention differently.
Many comments here talk about their physical or vision issues that make reading on screens a far better and easier way to access reading material. In my experience this is no small thing. I have been reading on screens since I was gifted a Kindle back in 2009. Now I have 2 Kindles, Colorsoft and Scribe for annotated note-taking. I also have a Boox for my non-Kindle books. I read books and articles on my iPad and phone occasionally as well. Substack is my only “social media.” My attention span has only expanded as a result of reading on screens. An additional benefit is the ease of lateral reading - linking out from the original text to a reference, term, or concept cited.
I’d love to see more public conversation about fragmented attention as an outcome of CHOICES people make about how, what, and why they engage (or don’t) with text and media in general, and for the attention conversation to get away from the simplistic print vs. screen dichotomy.
And Jan is exactly right about trying to dispose of physical books. 😩
Thanks for your enthusiasm!
Mind you, I'd rather have physical artifacts, if I had the space and if each one had been scanned and OCR'd and indexed for searching! The "book feel" is indeed special, and I still look an the two boxes of books I allowed myself when I had to get rid of the rest.
I don't like lighted screens. I have several e-ink readers that present an almost paper-like look, and that are extremely easy on batteries. (The real bane of e-books is the energy requirement.)
As far as vision issues go, that is a vote for e-books, no question.
My eyes are in their "extremely late 40s", and reading physical books can require bright lights and magnifiers. With e-books, I simply increase the font size!
In short, a physical book is a horse, and an e-book is an automobile. You don't take your automobile on hiking trails in the woods, and you don't take your horse on a cross-continental trip.
It is not just about using a device to read, rather than a printed book. It is also about setting aside reading time when you are awake enough to concentrate. I try to set aside some time to read during the day and then read for an hour or so. But when I was working that simply wasn't possible. Some people use public transport for reading if they have a reasonably long journey to work. I rode a bike, so that wasn't possible either. Audio books put me to sleep after five minutes.
Can you share references for these claims? I’m not sure the changes in comprehension, reading time, and so on are that consistent across all readers and all works. How humans share and absorb information is always changing. Faster these days, for sure, but I’d not sure I believe all tech is bad and print is always better. I’d love to be able to check references.
I can't speak for the author of course, but I would like to recommend Nicholas Carr's book, 'The Shallows' to you. Carr makes a similar case regarding reading comprehension and uses evidence based in neuroscience to back his claims. It is a well referenced book.
Thank you! I haven't read this. It's from 2019, so, I'll look for more recent work as well, but this sounds like a great beginning.
I don't think the author is saying that all tech is bad and print is always better.
And we are reading this on a device…..
I used to be able to read 500-600 words per minute on paper. I actually have a hard time reading this on my phone.
I am going to work on this with my granddaughter.
I couldn't even listen to this without having to restart it and reset focus. I have a TBI and I feel like this has been making me feel so overloaded. 🫨🫨
10 years ago I lost my job because of advocating for print books https://amybrunvand.substack.com/p/the-container-and-the-content?r=3aadnk&utm_medium=ios
I read almost all books on an eReader. (I have book mold issues.) I always have the lower left of the screen set to say how many minutes are left in the chapter. The lower right tells me how far into the book I am percentage-wise. I dislike reading via eReader for non-fiction where I want to retain facts or insights precisely for what is mentioned in this article. I resort to highlighting these parts and transcribing them as notes later.
Audio-wise, I'm unable to pay attention to fiction audiobooks but can listen endlessly to podcasts of people talking.
I used to read two to three print books a week, since about 1973. So possibly seven thousand books. I’ve had a home computer since 1981 and been on the internet since 1988. So I claim to be one of the first digital natives, my reading speed has always been fast on screen. Certainly the mental models for books exist both for print books and screen books for me. Professionally I read possibly half a million words a day on screen. Around 2014, something changed and my print book reading fell off a cliff. It’s only when I’m working in a bookshop that I read print. This article certainly goes some way towards explaining this for me.
Does any of this change for long-term screen readers. I have MS-related vision problems and have been reading on a tablet for 20 years. I use a tablet with a larger screen than my phone for any lengthy reading. I now have more trouble holding my attention with physical books, than the ebooks. Same for remembering information. The one thing I do miss is what you described as spatial memory -- that feel for just where in the book I read a particular fact or passsage. But I highlight and make annotations and there's always the search function.
Reading most physical books requires using a magnifier and that is distracting. I recently read an article that referenced a book not available as an ebook. I found a used copy and am working with it. I've had to go back to taking notes to hold that I fo.