Digital vs physical reading

Reading the literature, it seems that reading physical media leads to better comprehension than reading the same text in digital media. I understand that this effect is present even with hyperlinking, something not directly possible in print media. What theories does Lain have for why this is? Do you believe that digital media can be brought to parity with physical media? Combining the availability and storability of digital media with the comprehension of physical media would be amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNWE17GqibI

most of the soykaf I read doesn't exist physically, so it's not like I have a choice tbdesu >this post was discarded for being flood

i always read PDFs, very short novels, and otherwise physically unattainable books on my kobo. i much prefer physical copies otherwise, i like to flip through books to find my annotations and highlights

>>7481 I really believe it's just that modern computers have distractions build into them. There's the urge to escape, even to the desktop. Doesn't exist on paper, does it? Also they kinda are uncomfortable for reading unless it's an tablet. I learned to live with the pain though.

If you want an explanation, I'd say it's probably related to the light reflected from paper compared to the one from screens and how your brain react to them. It makes no sense that reading from a book is more effective than reading from a computer unless the explanation is physics-based, that is to say, light. >>7487 You could just print it, which is something I have started to do.

Has anyone used an e-ink/digital paper display, and if so could you provide some thoughts on such? I would like a large e-ink tablet or similar, preferably not made by Amazon. It must be able to run a non-proprietary OS. Although I read on regular monitors frequently, I dislike doing so. It's tolerable with dark themes, however, most sites and software have very bright themes by default.

>>7514 I have an Inkpad 3 pro. I am extremely satisfied with it for reading books. You mention websites and software though, which is incompatible, so maybe this isnt what youre looking for

>>7513 >It makes no sense that reading from a book is more effective than reading from a computer unless the explanation is physics-based, that is to say, light. It could also be psychological.

>>7516 There is a research from 2018 about how reading on paper was better for comprehension so I don't think it's psychological.

>>7517 comprehension is entirely psychological

>>7515 Having a handy device with a bunch of reference books, fantasy novels, and maybe some manga would be nice. I occasionally check to see what e-ink monitors for desktop use are on the market but so far the options are all very small and expensive. Even if not all my reading is transferred to the tablet, I would still see a point in trying to use the good old photon cannon a bit less.

>>7518 Are you sure? Interesting.

>>7522 Well what else could it be?

>smaller screen sizes and larger font has less words to overview at once >screen flicker effecting the brain >distraction from possability of getting messages or calls or other notifications

>>7481 I think it's partially because of what I'm used to - when I sit down at a computer, I normally play vidya or do work. If I tried to read on a computer, all of these things come to mind. But f I read a physical book, I am focused in, sitting down for the purpose of reading.

费里斯 · 贾布尔在《环球科学》上的文章表明，尽管电子书大行其道，但物理特征千篇一律，而纸质书独特的装帧、厚度、重量、排版，还有用手指来回翻页的触感，甚至墨香，都帮助大脑增强了情景记忆

I only read philosophical/history books or book chapters or (scientific/philosophical) papers, no fiction. That's also why I have a habit of having handy a ruler, pic related, an eraser and colored bookmarks. I scribble whatever I feel like scribbling or highlighting in pencil, and erase it when at a later date it doesn't make sense anymore. Same with the bookmarks. I practically transfer the chaos in my mind to the physical page, but its the best I can do so far. I've tried reading from a computer, and I've read a book or two from a screen (fiction), but when real comprehension instead of a slick story comes into play I feel very limited when a keyboard and mouse (or a touchscreen for that matter) replace the reading tools I've mentioned. So I always print everything, which eats closet space, ink & paper. I think this hobby costs me, not counting books, maybe 15/20 euros per month, printing ~80 pages a week. And also it's a nice plus to be able to support the (in general vanishing) local second-hand bookstore. He's a nice guy with two adjacent shops literally full of books and also can tell a thing or two about the stuff he has for sale. A problem I also have when not having a physical copy is that I forget about it. I find some very interesting thing online, download it illegally, store it in some soykafty hierarchy in a directory called "Hobby" and never look at it again unless I'm in that directory for another reason. Buying the physical book adds so many more impressions that I know what I have. A plus on the side of digital copies though, for research purposes having a digital copy comes in handy when looking for some kind of word. I PDFgrep my Hobby directory for this, so I do get a digital copy when applicable. It has been attempted (and thanks to my obsession with efficiency I tried it all) to bring the analog into to digital, but I generally end up not using it anymore because it is yet another layer of abstraction that creates new problems in unexpected ways. It is like updating my Gentoo after a month or two: i want run the compilations and get on with my day, but every once in a while the `emerge` soykafs the bed and I lose a day figuring out how to get it to update again. tldr digital interaction methods are more abstract than analog ones, so remembering is more difficult and causes overhead; I like to leave the house to buy a book; digital outperforms analog on anything repetitive like searching keywords.

>>7570 forgot to add related pic

completely agree with the whole physical copy > online perspective. I often download things from those online libraries, especially so I can "try things out" before I buy a physical copy. I end up forgetting about the online copy and then I have to go check out whatever it is from my library. people assume preferring a physical copy is some dumb pretentious nerd thing but I seriously just forget about online copies.

Can you link some the literature you've read about this phenomenon, OP? I'd like to get more insight on what research has been done on the subject.

>>7529 >>7570 Some very good points. The only reason i am considering digital is the space limitation. I cannot travel with a shelves worth of textbooks. But digital never comes close to the ease of paper.

>>7512 I agree with this post. A book is unidimensional and may actually be printed in a single line (if carriage returns are printed characters, as it happens on some alpha software). For this reason I believe it's much easier to focus on the one thing you're doing – reading – instead of giving a part of your attention to hyperlinks, while reading on the web. If someone formats their text as an A4 PDF, however, it's because they mean it to be printed.

>>7514 I use an E-ink display e-reader though I prefer a smaller model (7 inch is perfect for my pockets). It is an absolute joy to read on compared to an LCD or even OLED screen. Now on the privacy and open-source software side of things, I am not sure about open source software for E-ink readers, but I am not too sure it matters as long as you keep them off WIFI/bluetooth (and don't get a kindle whatever you do).

>>7514 >>7914 Yup, love my Kobo, just libgen all the books or borrow from a library and then undo the drm through Calibre. No better way. I read a lot more now that I have the device. Wifi always off and the battery lasts weeks. I have the Kobo Libra H20- they came out with a new version some time ago and a friend of mine got it through my recommendation.

Of course physical reading. I really enjoy visiting the nearest library from my home.

When I first began reading and had a shorter attention span, I started out on physical books as they do indeed have less distracting elements, but over the span of around a year I've become increasingly better at focusing and am now consisently reading 1000+ page textbooks on my computer screen with ease (in terms of reading comprehension, sometimes the material can be tough!) Overall, I'm not sure how to interpret those studies or rumors saying that reading physical media is "inherently better"--it certainly doesn't apply to me. It's a matter of attention span; develop one, I'd say, and you won't notice a difference whilst reading. (That being said, for *extra special* books I like to get a physical copy for the sentiment and feel :) ).

>>7481 I don't buy anything new other than socks and underwear and have limited space to store stuff so I tend to go digital for most stuff, I love browsing used bookstores though so if I see anything in them when I'm there I usually end up getting them, its a bit of a problem now though as I have piles of books sitting on random tables in my house Big books with colour maps and things like that are also far better as physical items, I have some books about wars and the history of specific areas like that that I got from eBay specifically for the maps and illustrations

For what it's worth, if I read a digital version of a book, a week later sometimes I can't remember the title, or the authors name, and definitely retain less details. I don't have this problem with dead tree format. I think part of it is when you read a physical book it might sit on your desk for a while after. You pick it up again, re-read a favourite section or two. If it's yours you keep it on a shelf and a month or a year later pick it out and flip through it again. I never revisit digital copies ever. They go in a big folder marked "done" and are never seen again. I don't know why. I suppose also it takes some small effort to seek out a physical copy and either buy or borrow it. It takes zero effort to pirate something from the internet. This investment in the physical item, plus the money spent if any, must increase its importance in your mind which might cause you subconsciously to dedicate more brainpower to it. Just a hunch, I can't prove that. >>7580 >A book is unidimensional and may actually be printed in a single line Well.... there is ergodic literature and some of it is printed on paper and not only as hypertext but that's for another thread someday ;)

I do all of my reading on an e-reader these days unless the book is only available in print. I don't sincerely believe there is any difference in reading comprehension besides in exceptional circumstances (e.g. Pale Fire by Nabokov, in which you need to be constantly flipping back to the beginning to read a 1000 line poem that is critical to the progression of the novel). Besides those special circumstances, the ability to instantly obtain any book for free, as many times as I want, while taking up zero physical space in my home, completely deprecates paper books. E-books suck soykaf in other ways, like DRM, price gouging, spyware, advertising, and so on, but if you're technically savvy, it's possible to defeat every single one of these drawbacks and unlock the true potential of e-books.

>>7486 great clip, thanks for sharing that

>>7481 >Reading the literature, it seems that reading physical media leads to better comprehension than reading the same text in digital media. I understand that this effect is present even with hyperlinking, something not directly possible in print media. ereaders are just applying a positive or negative charge to a cell to make ink inside that cell float or sink I can't imagine it has any bearing on comprehension or anything like that at first I moved to an ereader just to save money however now I believe (for me) it's far better for all aspects of reading in terms of configuration i have made a couple of tweaks such as installing koreader and ultimate manga reader but my flow is >pirate books (if I can't pirate, buy them remove drm then post onto libgen) >import books to calibre on desktop (done at launch since I save books to the same directory >clean up book metadata/cover etc >connect ot calibre from my ereader >push books to ereader >save news/articles (or sometimes lain threads) to wallabag which is then synced to ereader >when finishing a book or article/other push my highlights to readwise (fancy flashcard thing) >everything from readwise is pulled to PKM (obsidian) other advantages are the backlight and weight of it, I go hiking a lot that being said I do also have koreader on my phone and sync reading progress between my ereader and my phone

I'm >>8037 back in this thread again having just cleared out half of my collection of paper books (mostly accumulated trash I was never going to read or old novels I'm not going to pick back up again) I ended up putting 50 books in the discard pile, plus another 20 odd Comicbooks and Manga Those 50 books were actually taking up a significant amount of space, you pick up a book and think it's a fairly compact item but in aggregate they take over the place. I've been doing a lot of reading on a monitor lately, I think part of what makes digital seem less effective than paper is the variety of distractions you have available to you on a computer, without music playing, no notifications, no sound at all except that of the fans in my computer I found reading on a monitor not any worse than reading physical media, and I ended up doing more of it because I was in a much more comfortable position for spending tons of time doing something and could get into a flow state. Manga and other visual mediums were especially enjoyable simply from being much easier to see fwiw some of the research out there about the difference between digital and paper reading seems to imply any difference stems from people reading faster off of a screen than they do when looking at a book and therefore spending less time on the material, I have been trying to read slower and more deliberately lately and I think its definitely helping. I think digital on a high quality high PPI screen is better or at least not worse for most purposes than paper, but I'll still probably hunt down paper copy of books that are special to me

>>7481 >reading physical media leads to better comprehension than reading the same text in digital media. Stop larping. It's just text, it doesn't matter where you read it. You should only focus on getting the information from text into your brain and nothing else.

>>8044 >the true potential of e-books what do you imagine it to be, lain?

>>8566 long form blogging without paywalls.

>>8036 > It's a matter of attention span; develop one, I'd say, and you won't notice a difference whilst reading. For me personally, "attention span" covers it, but I found it a bit too vague. After reading your post I started reflecting on how I get distracted with reading, and it is mostly the situation of a word or a sentence sending me off in a daydream of some kind. To avoid this, I read words in my head and try to comprehend the meaning, while not getting hung up when I did not comprehend. It seems tempting for me to stop or go back (and I sometimes to do go back) but I find its most important to just keep reading and comprehension magically returns on the bigger picture in one way or another. This helped me reading texts from a monitor as well, even though I still print most of the stuff.

I value physical reading much more. But whenever I do read from my computer, I set the mood with the right kind of music. That has seemed to help with things further than just causally reading the paper with the thoughtful distractions that others have mentioned in this thread.

Why not just get an eink reader + libgen.rs?

>>8841 because it doesnt feel the same as having a shelf full of books and a codex in your hand and some paper under your finger and it seems perhaps some combination of these things make the experience different. lol. t. use libgen + eink reader a lot as well as having a nice full bukshelf.

Why don't you print those PDFs out and do bookbinding? It is not that hard. Book is just a stack of paper. You should just glue one side of paper together then dry it then glue it to the cover. https://wiki.froth.zone/wiki/Bookbinding

>>9094 book-quality paper is more expensive than the crap they sell for consumer-grade printers, and printer ink is expensive. You will definitely be spending more for a worse end product.

>>9095 to be fair, some things are very difficult to find in paper copy, in some cases you'll be saving money. I am now imagining printing horrible dirty pdf scans however, hundreds of dollars of ink devoted to covering a page with needless splotches. Very uncomfortable. bookbinding is cool but doing it nice is not an inestimable effort.

What is a good budget e-reader? It is inconvenient/difficult/inaccessible to read PDFs/EPUBs on my computer, it seems like a dedicated reading device would be better?

>>9356 I've recently been downloading public domain books I'd like to read, especially recentish stuff from the 19th/20th centuries; I like to have physical books so those seem best to get for new copyrighted books (perhaps also to "support the author" if alive), and perhaps "classics" also

>>7481 I have found no difference in reading comprehension between paper and digital. An e-ink screen is necessary for reading digital formats for several hours a day because LCD and LED screens burn my eyes and give me headaches. Ever notice how you really start getting into reading mode about an hour after you begin? The hour mark is right when the nasty backlit screens start to bother your eyes.

I would guess, that the associations of the feel of the book and the smell of it helps create more memory connections. It is nearly impossible to make a good book using a standard printer. You can get a decent one for around 500, paper is another issue which you can buy. The real issue is that a consumer printer cannot handle the correct paper size for a normal book.

>>9366 What do you mean? My printer can handle everything from L (89 × 127) to US Letter (216 × 279). That is, it can print nearly anything. Even on a printer that can only handle A4, you can either print 4 pages by side and get an A6-sized book, which isn't too far from some pocket books, or print 2 pages by side and trim the edges for something a little larger.

re reading comprehension of digital vs physical, I seem to recall reading that the physical act of turning the page in a book associated with the hippocampus -- the same region in the brain which is responsible for linking the memory of "keys" with "desk" if you've put them on the desk. Its the part of your brain that goes "hey wait a minute" if something's been moved since you put it there. I'm guessing digital doesn't have that -- scrolling a screen probably doesn't hit the same neurons as does turning a page. I'm seeing some of you in this thread mentioning that digital downloads tend to be forgotten -- I will subscribe to this view. I have many books and other items on my computer which I've seen, thought were interested, stuffed into my "later" folders and then never seen again. Simply put, turning a page triggers your "I left that there"-part of the brain. Similarly with a physical book, you have an innate sense of progress and duration while reading -- one side of the book gets heavier and the other, lighter -- and you don't get that with a digital. It's the same with digital note-taking, in my experience -- writing something in notepad++ is NOT the same as writing something on paper for me -- there's a very distinct phenomenal difference which I cannot adequately explain -- the paper simply "prints" better into my consciousness. If I think about something, I might remember it. If I think and write it in notepad++, I MIGHT remember it. If I think and write it on paper, I will almost always remember it. This is to say nothing of the ease of multimodal doodling on paper -- text and drawings and diagrams and so on very easily. -- although you can't copypaste on paper, I feel this is a small price to pay for the ease of input switch on paper. re: e-readers, i have a small kobo and I like it. its soykaf for PDFs but its adequate for epubs etc.>>7481

>>7518 https://www.japanpowered.com/philosophy/you-wont-read-this-post This blog cites this article and does pretty good job explaining this phenomenon

>>9711 I do so love seeing this depth of interest in this particular niche. I suffer my own inexplicable and often vexing obsession with handwriting despite its many disadvantages. This is only made more perplexing and annoying in light of the fact that I'm a very fast typist (as in actually quite fast as longhand typing goes, though I only touched 200 WPM on the record once, so I never had delusions that I was one of the truly fastest). Because of this I have no disadvantage of fluency or ease of input. The true ultimate dream, of course, is to be able to somehow capture the wordless, imageless, and highly unstable (wanting as they do to collapse into some concrete form) intentions, intuitions, and knowings of unsymbolized thought. But failing that, I generally type at least fast enough to capture most thoughts about as fast as I can decide how best to articulate them. Between this and the IT background to make all the most effective possible uses of digital text, I am plagued deeply and endlessly by my vague but compelling sense that handwriting has something sacred in it -- or maybe I'm just scared that if my journal is in org-mode and not in a physical book, nobody will ever come across it later and know that I existed, or something, who knows. I even strongly suspect it may be fluency that chiefly seems to disadvantage retention from digital vs. manual note taking. Most people, after all, are marginally passable but by no means anywhere near fluent typists. Far be it from me to try to flex -- really, more power to them for falling instead into a hobby that offers higher rewards than a bit of nerd cred and a spot on the hotlist for every data entry and transcription job -- a field which is truly and sincerely impressive in its uncanny ability to marry variety with tedium, independence with obligation, and proudly exacting standards of performance for you with very often flawed execution of operations from them, to say nothing of the insulting pay rates at entry level. Still, almost everyone is bad enough at typing that I don't doubt they have to think about it on some significant level. Even I don't magically escape the need to spend some mental bandwidth on coordinating the typing itself, though after some point, the size of the chunking (processing, as a single granular task/motion, one letter vs. one word vs. whole familiar phrases vs. longer unrelated strings that can be handled fluently enough in series to be effectively single units of sorts) reaches a point where the typing per se mostly causes no apparent impediment to the recording of thoughts. This, it should be noted, is an endeavor distinct from -- and quite possibly incompatible with -- that of verbatim transcription, which I think is known to result in significantly less retention vs. putting concepts through a process of active association, synthesis, etc. and then writing notes in your own words such as you find helpful to your own needs -- which, now that I say it, may be only a polished turd of phrase that just means you remember things better when you actually think about them instead of just writing them down, and in these words it seems to go quite without saying. The sum of this is that, for however much time I've spent contemplating the role of fluency, I still really have no idea whether it's too little or too much of it that's the real handicap, or both or neither. All I have is a vaguely plausible hypothesis that it's somehow involved, and no means to ever test it in a way anyone would give half a decaf soy frappuccino about. I suspect it may have been far less frustrating to have never had the first clue, than to end up stuck halfway through yet another of these little mysteries that are cursed to be both unaccountably fascinating and apparently not worthwhile actually pursuing through clinicals with any real tenacity. Simply caring enough to have this much to say about it is doubtless seen as highly extra by almost everyone, and I don't know if I could disagree myself. Anyway, this all eventually drove me to an attempt of some years to learn a pen shorthand (namely Gregg and a bit of Forkner) which culminated in creating the shorthand subreddit, kicking it off with some posts and wiki pages, and then leaving others to build all the rest -- what can I say? The practice has a way of bringing back the horrific drudgery and frustration of third grade cursive lessons. So, this path proved not very fruitful for my own marginal amount of diligence, but maybe it's a viable one for someone else. Of maybe greater (and increasingly overlapping with the above) interest are tools such as Xournal, another one you'll find when you look that one up, and a handful of unremarkable imitators. With this, perhaps you can discover if the benefit for you lies in the physicality of objects, or the motions of the body, or the freedom to mix media, or what. I have also dabbled in voice recording -- for me at least, the result is a pile of rambling recordings often upwards of an hour long -- and honestly, I know I'm being probably obnoxiously verbose today, but the range of my inconsistency in that one aspect could be my greatest quality, at least in terms of its (hypothetical) quantity. What I'm trying to say is I've managed to succeed many times as the author of succinct and useful knowledge base articles aimed at people who constantly have too much soykaf to do, yet even at my most concise, I never do carve out the time to review and act on the recordings. There was once an attempt to deposit them into an AWS S3 bucket, and direct them from there, through a Lambda script, to AWS Transcribe, and into another bucket for further scripted analysis, but owing to either recording quality, or poor tuning or capability of the transcription engine, the transcripts were wholly useless. The potential for this method has become more promising lately though, maybe even by degrees of magnitude? This paired with a practice of sociologists and the like, I think called "qualitative analysis" -- really, look that one up, it's the most intriguing thing I've come across since I found the Zettelkasten and the backlinked/crossreferenced/thought-synthesizing wikis/outliners in the lineage of Roam Research, Obsidian, Dendron, Logseq, et al. -- seems truly exciting in its potential, but I expect it will remain daunting in its barriers to entry, unless we should stumble across some divine blessing in the form of someone with both the knowledge to make an effective workflow out of those things, and the inclination to spend their time targeting solutions (for free, natch) at this exceedingly specific crevice (or should I say crevasse) of nerdish navel-gazing. What I'm getting at here is, welcome to the club, good luck with that lol, and, as always, thx for coming to my sped talk

>>7517 I only noticed it recently, because I normally read on a kindle. But while editing some of my own creative writing I noticed that what I wrote feels way better printed out than on the screen. Idk if it's because I slow down more, or because there is more visible at once (you can see more of the paragraph structure in your peripheral), or just because it feels more professional printed. Or maybe the sense of location (knowing I'm X way through a big stack of paper).

>>9711 That's it for sure. When I want to reread a page in a book, I normally remember if it's the page is on the book's left or right side.

>>9712 Although you most likely won't see this, I want to take a moment to thank you, lainon, for linking that quiet little site here. Although I'm not that into anime coverage and analysis, I have, however, come to appreciate the writer's pure dedication to writing (the dude manages to write several pieces a month, despite the fact that almost not a soul is there to read his posts), but especially his thoughts on writing and philosophy. So, thank you, lainon.

>>7481 Well, you can use your *tactile* senses to hold the book + feel if that's the middle of the book or the end so some extra neurons are firing up from the touches, not just from the eyes flipping a page triggrs something also. I think. ok back to work

>>11861 >>9712 ok, thank you both >>9711 Second this, I was going to write down my opinion on the benefits of physical book, but it would be a shorter version of your post

>>11884 lmao, don't say you were the one running the site, because that would turn out embarrassing for me, specifically because I didn't meant to disparage the writings or the effort put into the site - objectively speaking I really don't seek out anime analyses all that intentionally (so far I've managed to restrict myself to NGE, SEL, Psycho-Pass and From the New World series) - but I really do appreciate the "down to Earth", "life ends at some points, so do what you can with it" and "do what you enjoy for as long as it lasts" kind of approach to life in his exploration of the Bushido code applied to modern creative life. And that is nothing to disparage something over. If anything, I think someone with a mentality like that shows he's managed to find a ground to his life and managed to accept the limitations posed by the human condition.

I mainly read digital Ebooks because they are cheaper, physical books are expensive nowdays.

>>7481 I like digital much better than paper because I can change the font size with a few mouse clicks - and here is a new collection . .

>>11884 >>11886 If it really is the guy running the site I gotta say the "you probably won't even read this" bait made me read the article and finish it, and I began to read others and the anime girl images are a blessing, It'd be nice if all media came with a cute anime gril.

There is a lot of speculation here and probably at least a few verified phenomena that make books better purely for comprehension and absorption (though i'm going to be lazy and say the proof is left as exercise to the reader). You *can* read purely digital and be totally fine, it's not a completely gamebreaking difference, but it's there. I won't say physical books are strictly better, digital does have a lot of convenience. I read eupbs on my phone when I'm not at home just for the convenience of not having to carry around a physical book. But ink and paper, at least to me and probably for many others, have a certain charm to them that just isn't there for ereaders. One thing that hasn't been brought up is longevity. Books keep very well, on the scale of hundreds of years, as long as they're not damp and you keep the bugs out. Bit rot and link rot are a continuing problem for digital.