The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens

E is for Enhanced: 8 Enhanced Ebooks Worth Checking Out Ebooks are no longer relegated to just text on a screen. The books we read on our edevices are changing thanks to enhanced features like audio and video. When the first Kindle came out in 2007, many of us wondered at its ability to fit dozens of books on such a small device. Over the past four years, Amazon and other ebook reader manufacturers, like Barnes & Noble, have continued to impress us with each update. And then, of course, there's the Apple iPad, which changed everything for ereaders when it came along in 2010. Allowing for video and audio playback, the iPad could do things other ereaders could not. Enhanced ebooks can include video, film clips from news reels or major motion pictures, drawings, author interviews, original music, diagrams, photos, and more. Though still a fairly new concept, there seems to be two sides in the enhanced ebook debate.

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Multimedia Feature Reading from paper versus screens: a critical review of the empirical literature. This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. (1992) Reading from paper versus screens: a critical review of the empirical literature. Ergonomics, 35(10), 1297-1326. Abstract The advent of widespread computer use in general and increasing developments in the domain of hypertext in particular have increased awareness of the issue of reading electronic text. 1. In simple terms, there exist two schools of thought on the subject of electronic texts. "but a book is a book is a book. The second school favours the use of electronic text, citing ease of storage and retrieval, flexibility of structure and saving of natural resources as major incentives. "the question is not can we do everything on screens, but when will we, how will we and how can we make it great? Such extremist positions show no signs of abating though it is becoming clear to many researchers in the domain that neither is particularly satisfactory. 2. 3. 4.

Why teenagers are so resistant to e-readers | Children's books There seems to be an idea spouted by many working in the media at the moment, that young people are giving up on traditional media. The BBC took BBC Three off our TV screens recently as it moves online to further target that lucrative 16-24 demographic. The BBC Trust claimed that there was “clear public value in moving BBC Three online, as independent evidence shows younger audiences are watching more online and watching less linear TV”. Books just aren’t the same though. But it’s worth remembering that, against all odds, the sale of physical books is on the up and the sale of digital books is falling. People have their different reasons for this. Sure, I love the internet. But that’s not the same as the assumption that everything people my age do is filtered through the digital sphere. No doubt about it, the world is turning increasingly digital.

The Digital Networked Textbook: Is It Any Different? Let's speculate that before this year's cohort of first-year teachers retires from math education more than 50% of American classrooms will feature 1:1 technology. That's a conservative prediction – both in the timeline and the percentage – and it's more than enough to make me wonder what makes for good curricula in a 1:1 classroom. What are useful questions to ask? Here's the question I ask myself whenever I see new curricula crop up for digital networked devices like computer, laptops, tablets, and phones. Is it any different? That isn't a rhetorical or abstract question. Digital If you print out each page of the digital networked curriculum, is it any different? The answer here is "sort of." When I look at iBooks in the iBookstore from Pearson and McGraw-Hill or when I see HMH publish their Algebra Fuse curriculum in the App Store, I see lots of features and, yes, they require a digital medium. So the question becomes, "Is it different enough?" I don't think so. Networked More Different

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Is page reading different from screen reading? - Wired Science I perked up a couple weeks ago when I read Jonah Lehrer’s post about e-books and the possible differences between reading a screen and reading a page. Like Jonah, I regard e-books with an excitement tinged with lament. But as he notes, the tide is in; they’re here to stay. Jonah describes in his post how, when packing to move back to the US from England a few years ago, he stuffed his bags with books. When I packed for England two months ago, I packed just two physical volumes, indispensable because I’d annotated them heavily for my current book project. The rest of my reading pile — about 30 books — came along in my iPad. Yet even as I dive into these iPad books every night, I feel, like Jonah, that reading on a screen differs in some significant way from reading on paper. Where’s the proof? The first echoes something Jonah offered in his post-scriptural “bonus point”:’ Bonus point: I sometimes wonder why I’m only able to edit my own writing after it has been printed out, in 3-D form.

A Curriculum Staple: Reading Aloud to Teens Dana Johansen, a teacher at the Greenwich (CT) Academy, reads to eighth graders.Photo courtesy of Greenwich Academy. Every year, Beth Aviv, a high school English teacher in Westchester County, NY, asks her students, “How many of you were read to by a parent when you were little?” Last year, only a quarter of the class raised their hands. Aviv discovered these students were starved for storytelling. Rabbit, and Lynda Blackmon Lowery’s Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the Selma Voting Rights March (Dial, 2015). Young people often listen at a higher comprehension level than they read, according to Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook (Penguin, 1982), a best seller with more than two million copies sold, and now in its seventh edition. Perhaps not surprisingly, Scholastic’s Kids & Family Reading Report, 5th edition, based on a survey conducted in the fall of 2014, correlates high reading enjoyment with reading frequency in students ages six to 17. Stress-free books

Tim Waterstone Predicts eBooks Will Decline. Also, Horseless Carriages are just a Fad Tim Watersone, founder of the UK bookstore chain, had an old geezer moment at the Oxford Literary Festival last week. The Telegraph is reporting that Waterstone has predicted that ebooks would decline: The so-called e-book “revolution” will soon go into decline, the founder of Waterstones has said, insisting that the traditional physical book is here to stay.Tim Waterstone, who founded the bookshop chain in 1982, argued that the printed word was far from dead and Britain’s innate love of literature had made books one of the most successful consumer products ever.He added that he had heard and read “more garbage about the strength of the e-book revolution than anything else I’ve known”.…“I think you read and hear more garbage about the strength of the e-book revolution than anything else I’ve known,” Mr Waterstone told the audience in Oxford. If you go read the original article you’ll see that the Telegraph mentions that the UK ebook market was worth £300 million in 2013.

10 Trends Driving The Future Of Book Publishing Remember those days? Mark Coker (@markcoker), Founder of Smashwords, the world’s largest indie book distributor, gave a great talk at the excellent Edinburgh Publishing Conference on the key trends driving the future of the book publishing industry. The conference brought together a wide range of experiences from across the publishing industry under the title ‘Publishing: Evolution, Disruption & the Future’ and further posts will follow in due course. Founded in 2008, Smashwords is now the world’s largest indie book distributor, with 60,000 authors and it shares data about what book sales looks like. Mark’s wife was a former reporter for a soap opera magazine. Together, they wrote a novel called ‘Boob Tube‘. Mark’s view is that the publishing industry has developed a culture of ‘no’. So Smashwords was founded to answer the question – what if we could make it possible for any writer, anywhere in the world, to publish for free – meaning to upload, distribute and to get paid. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

I Am Not My Disability: Outstanding Books For and About Young People with Disabilities - National Reading Campaign National Reading Campaign Every two years, the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) chooses outstanding books for and about young people with disabilities. This biennial selection draws attention to books published around the world that address special needs and situations and which encourage inclusion at every level. Outstanding titles, including the one below, become part of The IBBY Collection of Books for Young People with Disabilities. This one-of-a-kind collection is located in Canada at North York Central Library, part of the Toronto Public Library system. Here is one of the titles from the 2015 list: Emily Included By Kathleen McDonnell Published by Second Story Press The true story of a Canadian girl with cerebral palsy whose family refused to accept the limits that others placed on her is brought to life in this short, easy-to-understand chapter book. Interested in learning more about The IBBY Collection of Books? Copyright © Toronto Public Library, 2015

Paper vs digital reading is an exhausted debate The digital revolution is going into a decline, Tim Waterstone told the Oxford literary festival. Well, it's an attention-grabbing statement, ideally suited to our culture of assertive headlines, but it's probably not true. That's not to say that the rapid growth of digital will necessarily continue, either, certainly not in markets that are already saturated with handheld devices. Why? Because the future is – as William Gibson told us quite a long time ago now – not evenly distributed. In fact, if one thing is ubiquitous these days it would seem to be liminality. Digital will continue to grow for a while at least, and continue to exist, because it is becoming part of the world we inhabit at a level below our notice, no more remarkable than roads or supermarkets. By the same token, paper has a place in our hybrid future. It's time to look beyond our borders rather more, and see that we are part of the world.

A few future sources of ebook innovation Usually, at the end of each year, the media gaggle gathers, regurgitates the nonsense they’ve been spouting all year, and washes the stale bile down with a set of inconsequential predictions of what might happen next year. It’s a catchall opportunity for prognostication for an industry whose main contribution to society is inane gossip and fact-free misinterpretations of research and science. Instead of being a silly beggar and making specific predictions of the future, all of which are almost guaranteed to be wrong, one way or another, I’d like to highlight a few of the future sources of ebook innovation. None of them, I’d like to emphasise, are in any way related to the big publishing companies, which will have to work very hard just to remain in publishing in ten years time. 1. Almost everybody has settled on a very narrow range of features for ebook reading systems. (You can’t beat an incumbent who has a majority lock on the market by fighting it toe-to-toe. 2. 3. 4.

Why kids still need ‘real books’ to read — and time in school to enjoy them Nancie Atwell is the renowned founder of the Center for Teaching and Learning, an award-winning non-profit independent K-8 demonstration school in Edgecomb, Maine, where she teaches seventh- and eighth-grade writing, reading and history. She is the author of numerous books, including the classic “In the Middle: A Lifetime of Learning About Writing, Reading, and Adolescents,” which has inspired teachers for years, and she has won numerous awards, including the first-ever $1 million Global Teacher Prize given earlier this year by the Varkey Foundation. Atwell’s school has a national reputation for its research-based literacy methods which focus on engaging and challenging students while fostering relationships between faculty and parents. A hallmark of the school are the collections of books, carefully selected by adults, from which students can choose. Ladies and gentlemen: I’m honored to be speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative.