The Science of Paper versus Screens (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Science of Paper versus Screens (2013)

scientificamerican.com

38 pointskawera10 comments

> Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says.

I'm sure most people haven't thought it through that deeply, but when you acquire an ebook, you don't actually own it. All you have is a license to use it for the duration of your life. You can't bequeath it to your heirs when you die, and you can't give it to a friend when you're done reading it. In most cases, you can't even lend it to a friend for a limited period.

> You can't bequeath it to your heirs when you die, and you can't give it to a friend when you're done reading it

Related to this, something that has bothered me about using an e-book reader, and having a 2 year old son, is that I don't have the books on display for him to "stumble upon".

For now he's too young to discover new books off the shelf and read them to himself, but I'm conscious of this limitation with e-books. They're all "locked up" on the device. I got into reading because The Hobbit was on my parent's bookshelf and the cover of the dragon caught my attention.

I've thought about it for a while now and my solution is to read new e-books on a reader, and if they meet my ambiguous criteria of being "shelf worthy" I'll buy physical copies and put them on the shelf, in the hopes that my son will find them.

The Hobbit is already on there.

cf. Stallman's essay / short story from 1997: The Right to Read [1]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

> All you have is a license to use it for the duration of your life.

As long as Amazon keeps existing and doesn't delete your account on their whim.[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-c...

depending on your definition of "own", you might not own a physical book either. you just have a transferable license. you can read it, you can give it to a friend or heir, but you can't make a copy and both read it at the same time.

Under US law, this isn’t a “transferable license”. You have bought the book and enjoy the rights under the first sale doctrine. The fact that there exist copyright laws that prevent you from doing certain things with the book does not make this into a license. That would be like saying that “you don’t buy a baseball bat, you acquire a limited license under which you may hit balls, but not people, with it.

> those who had to scroll through the continuous text did not do as well on the attention and working-memory tests. Wästlund thinks that scrolling—which requires a reader to consciously focus on both the text and how they are moving it—drains more mental resources than turning or clicking a page, which are simpler and more automatic gestures.

This would indicate that using page-down or space bar to scroll through websites would be better than manually scrolling. But I find the opposite is true, since so many websites have opaque toolbars at the top/bottom. So when I hit [space] and it shifts the content up by one-screenful, it's actually scrolling too far. So then I have to back up using the arrow keys or by scrolling manually.

It's too bad browsers don't have a setting to make it so that page-down only goes 85% of the way or something like that, to avoid this issue. Of course, you'd still have to hunt to find where the next line ended up.

I don't know what browser you're using, but I found extension-based solutions for both Chrome[0] and Firefox[1].

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/custom-pagedown-pa...

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/307739/scroll-down-half-the-...

I think I read faster and retain more when I read actual paper rather than reading something onscreen, too - nice to see this corroborated. I do feel like I get judged when I read a physical book at work (staring at a book for more than an hour or so brings the boss around to ask 'what are you up to there, commandlinefan? Keepin' busy?'), whereas nobody bats an eye when I spend all day staring at my computer monitor, so I lean toward digital "books" like O'Reilly Safari for learning even though they feel less efficient.

The feel and the smell of books engages me a bit more than a screen does. When I’m really into a book, it’s much more likely that the texture of the stack of pages will pull me out than my partner saying it’s time for dinner.

Books are weird.

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