I am such a voracious reader that I have long abandoned the printed page. Don’t get me wrong, I have hundreds of books and am loathe to get rid of them, even though the chances of reading even a handful of them are minimal. With bookshelves already groaning, it is a question of storage. The cheaper option was to buy a digital reader than to build an extension to house an ever-growing library.
Convenience, portability, never being without something to read are some of the obvious attractions of going digital, but I do miss the touch and feel of a physical book. I also wonder whether an overuse of digital readers has an impact on my comprehension of what I am reading and the ability to retain what I have read. One of the reasons that I have turned to reviewing the books I read is that the process forces me to pay particular attention to what I am reading and that I also I have a record – yes, in digital form – of what it was all about.
That there is some substance to my fears is evidenced by a study published in the ever popular Review of Educational Research conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Valencia. After analysing more than two dozen studies on reading comprehension conducted between 2020 and 2022 involving some 470,000 participants, they have concluded that print reading over a long period could boost comprehension skills by six to eight times more than digital reading does.
The reasons for the association between frequency of digital reading for leisure and text comprehension being close to zero, they suggest, are that the linguistic quality of digital texts tend to be lower and that the mindset for digital reading tends to be shallower with the text being scanned rather than being immersed in. Reading on multi-tasking equipment can be distracting with constant interruptions from other social media programs running on the machine. On the positive side, the negative relationship between digital reading found in primary school children turns positive amongst secondary school pupils.
Digital books read on a single purpose machine might be a different matter, of course. It is a fascinating area of study, but, for now, spatial reasons dictate that I maintain my digital habit.
windowthroughtime 
The Grauniad article that cited the research indicated it was focused on children, a fact very few who’ve commented on it or referenced in in reading-related blogs or social media posts have mentioned.
Quote:
“The study, published in the Review of Educational Research, also found that while there is a negative relationship between digital reading and comprehension for primary school students, the relationship turns positive for secondary school and undergraduate students.
Salmerón suggests that this may be because young children are less able to navigate the distractions, such as incoming messages, that might come with reading on a digital device. “We know that our ability to regulate our cognition evolves during adolescence,” he said. Young children “may not be fully equipped to self-regulate their activity during digital leisure reading”.
The authors also said that young children engaging in frequent digital reading may learn less academic vocabulary “in a critical period when they are shifting from learning to read to reading to learn”.”
The details from the article do seem to suggest the issue could well be more to do with distractions from focus than the reading medium itself. The changes to my own reading (100% digital) I’ve made since reading the article last month have been to make sure I slow downwhen reading weightier material, and to make more highlights when I come across passages I want to remember.
Your blog looks cook so I’m going to follow!
Thank you. Hope you enjoy it