A recent study showed 92% of college students would rather do their reading the old-fashioned way, you know, with paper. This interesting piece of information came to us from the Los Angeles Times in their article, “92% of college students prefer print books to e-books, study finds.”
The finding comes from American University linguistics professor Naomi S. Baron, author of the book “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World.” Baron led a team that asked 300 college students in the United States, Slovakia, Japan and Germany how they preferred to read.
This may make digital content producers shake in their boots but I understand the results. Even with the convenience of e-readers, I miss the tactile experience of touching and smelling the pages of books – especially library books. Now the germaphobe in me should be bothered by that, but strangely, no.
The interesting caveat was when it came to light reading, such as news and other feature articles, reading on screen seemed to be the better choice for those surveyed.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
