I’m not gonna lie—I do experience a wee bit of a thrill when I get to say I told you so.
OK, this isn’t really an “I told you so” moment… but this is something I’ve been saying for the past several years.
Paper Versus Pixel by Nicholas Carr (posted on Nautilus Quarterly, 2013)
This doesn’t really offer any new ideas. That print offers better reading comprehension than ebooks is something that’s been shown by quite a lot of data recently. The telling quote for me is this:
Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects—a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols… The differences between page and screen go beyond the simple tactile pleasures of good paper stock. To the human mind, a sequence of pages bound together into a physical object is very different from a flat screen that displays only a single “page” of information at a time. The physical presence of the printed pages, and the ability to flip back and forth through them, turns out to be important to the mind’s ability to navigate written works, particularly lengthy and complicated ones. We quickly develop a mental map of the contents of a printed text, as if its argument or story were a voyage unfolding through space.
I told you so.
John the Librarian 