Study Shows iPad, Kindle and Printed Books are Good, PC's Bad

"A study of people reading long-form text on tablets finds higher reading speeds than in the past, but they're still slower than reading print."

24 people were tested using the iBook application (indistinguishable from Stanza and other eBook readers) on an iPad, an Amazon Kindle, an eBook reader on a PC and a bound and printed book.

Reading speeds suffered on the electronic devices by as much as almost 11% slower than the printed book, with the Kindle results the slowest, though not statistically significant from the iPad.

The largest surprise to me though, was the user satisfaction levels. The readers were rather happy with the iPad, Kindle and printed book, hated the PC.  The readers didn't care for the weight of the iPad, didn't like the low contrast of the Kindle and the PC reminded them of work.

My wife and I are avid readers with almost 1,000 printed books on our shelves.  We also read eBooks on our computers and handheld devices (current iPod Touch and HTC EVO) having retired our Rocket eBook readers (REB1100s and REB1200s) to a box in the closet.  We too prefer the printed and bound "TreeBook" format but do most of our reading on the computer screen.  At our ages, a 24" screen beats even a 10" screen.

eBooks, no matter the reading device have a lot of advantages such as not needing walls of bookshelves, they don't collect dust, aren't a fire hazard and are a heck of a lot easier to handle when house moving.

TreeBooks though, may be read anywhere, any time, don't need electricity and ten years from now, you won't have a problem finding the right program or device to read them.  After TSHTF, society collapses and little is left except for mutant cockroaches driving old Buicks, a printed book can still be read.

 

 

You can read the full article on the study at: iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

 

Disclaimer: This blog post was created using MarsEdit on my MacBook Pro. I love the combination of quality hardware and software that is stable and functional while making things easy to get things done. All original content is copyright ©2008-2010 by Rick Cross, all rights reserved.