A comparison of reading paper and on-line documents

Abstract

We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies.

The Reader's Devices: The affordances of ebook readers

“…Creating annotations and notes improves retention and comprehension (Marshall & Ruotolo, 2002;O'Hara & Sellen, 1997) and, more importantly for knowledge workers, enables readers to make -relevant connections to their own writing‖ (Hillesund, 2010). While underlining, marginal marks, and brief notes do not have -explicit meaning to the computer, they have rich semantic meaning for people and enhance visual and episodic memory‖ and the -ability to make unstructured, free-form, idiosyncratic‖ marks on digital text is a fundamental affordance needed to support knowledge workers of all sorts (Schilit, et al 1999, p. 67).…”

A Comparison of Paper-Based and Online Annotations in the Workplace

“…Further, while reading one page, readers can use another page for writing notes. -orientation: paper documents give readers a better sense of location within the text, by physical cues, such as the thickness on the sides of a book or different paper materials in a magazine [10]. These cues support text skimming and cross-reading and they are instrumental when trying to relocate some text [13,14].…”

“…These cues support text skimming and cross-reading and they are instrumental when trying to relocate some text [13,14]. Digital documents do not hold these characteristics [8,10], an issue that needs to be overcome by increased attention for usability in device design and interface design. -multiple displays: paper provides a single canvas for each page of text [15].…”

“…The virtual pages simulate this on the single device screen, but in some cases supporting concurrence reading from several documents turns to be an unwieldy task [10]. -cooperative interaction: by circulating a piece of paper, more than one person can interact with the content and build upon each others' annotations [11].…”

In-Context Annotations for Refinding and Sharing

“…This is surprising, given the abundance of literature showing the importance of annotations for comprehension and their benefits for reading and writing proposes [5]. Similar to the paper-based environment, digital annotations are expected to be useful for supporting comprehension and interpretation [6].…”