We're not huge fans of e-books over here at TechEye. Call us Luddites, but we like being able to grab a book off the shelf of a shop, bringing it back and plonking it in a room never to be looked at again.
Besides, put a bunch of Gurdjieff, Sartre, Hume, Whatever in your living room and you look smart as heck.
Apparently the human brain agrees. According to a recent study, people read e-books slower than they read printed media. Nielsen Norman Group tested out the iPad and the Kindle 2 and found that users read books six percent and ten percent slower than in a regular book, respectively. So the iPad advert that says "more books than you can read in a lifetime" is six percent more true.
That said, while participants read e-readers a lot slower than regular books, they rated their satisfaction higher than in print, but just about. Out of seven, the iPad got a score of 5.8, the Kindle got 5.7 and the printed book got 5.6.
The only medium which people really didn't like using was on a regular PC, grabbing a satisfaction rating of 3.6. We reckon that's because computers are cold and not tactile, whereas the Kindle and the iPad are nice hunks of machinery that you can touch and fawn over, as you would with a real book.
Doctor Jakob Nielson, who led the research, said: "This study is promising for the future of e-readers and tablet computers. We can expect higher quality screens in the future, as indicated by the recent release of the iPhone 4 with a 326 dpi display. But even the current generation is almost as good as print in formal performance metrics."
With user satisfaction so high, we reckon slight reading problems won't stop fans of shiny gadgets from keeping on trucking with their e-readers and tablet PCs. You can't even get 3G on a paperback.
FRANKENBOOKS: a new definition of for the Digipocalypse, as new term
>>> for e-books and e-readers. Part humor, part serious, part cautionary
>>> tale, part satire, part fun, all in the spirit of give and take, since
>>> device readers and e-books are here to say, like them or not. I just
>>> hope "frankenbooks" do not replace paper books completely. If that
>>> happens, we've lost the game.
says
Mike Schrammon Jul 5th
A study conducted by usability consultant Jakob Nielsen claims that reading on e-book readers like the iPad and the Kindle still doesn't match up to the reading speed of good old printed paper. The test chose 32 people (admittedly a small sample, but one that was felt to be representative of an e-reader audience), taught them how to read on both the Kindle and the iPad, and then clocked their speed in reading through an Ernest Hemingway story on both devices, a PC-based reader, and the printed word.
It turns out, according to the study, that the iPad was generally faster than the Kindle at reading speed -- about 6.2% slower than reading a normal book, compared to the Kindle's 10.7% slower than the printed word. The way it all worked out, there was no actual significant difference between the iPad and the Kindle, so the study can't say officially which one of those is faster. But the difference between the Kindle and the book was significant, so reading print is faster than e-readers so far.
The iPad and the Kindle barely beat the book in ease-of-use, while the PC lagged way behind, so the study is still bullish on e-readers in general. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of reasoning on why the e-readers are slower -- is the audience just not used to them, or is there something in the mechanics that make things slower? Since e-readers can adapt for usability and your standard book is pretty much as good as it's going to get, we'll likely see the iPad overtake a printed page in usability very soon.
[via PC World]
Hee: "The iPad advert that says 'more books than you can read in a lifetime' is six percent more true."
I must confess, I do find it handy to have a bunch of reading material on-hand when I'm stuck waiting somewhere. I forget to open iBooks, but I do make heavy use of "ReadItLater", which lets you mark Web material for later reading, and has an iPhone app that can download that material to read offline.
But it's definitely a different reading experience to sitting down with a novel and enjoying the soft light that reflects off a printed page, versus the backlit radiance of a phone-screen, which apparently also produces a time-scrambling effect on the brain.
So, yes, both have their uses, and maybe an either/or choice will never be as inevitable or inescapable as the story-hungry media suggest.
However, I agree that I enjoy a lot more reading my ebook than a paper book.
Oh wait, I don't want to read faster, because I'll have to say goodbye to my friends faster then too...
There are other psychological and physiological tests that can be done, but larger sample sizes are necessary.
If they are reading slower because they are given a new ebook reader and are unfamiliar with the controls, then it is a short-term thing.
If they are reading slower because it is hard for them to see the words, that is a problem.
Study needs to be done with a couple of thousand people across all ages and familiarity levels with the technologies in order to be useful.
And it also needs to randomize the order of the devices.
As mentioned, nothing in this study was significant. The sample set was too small (24 people), the activities too limited, and the differences too marginal.
Yay Interweb pseudojournalism! You can always count on it to pick up random WTF bullshit and report it like it's news.