Digital Reading Vs Print Reading: Advantages and Limitations

Introduction

The article, Digital Reading was published in June 2012 and was made by Ziming Liu, who is a professor at San Jose State University. According to Berkeley Electronic Press. (n.d.) Dr. Ziming Liu received his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996 for library and information studies and he also published a variety of top-tier scholarly journals. The article is about, as the title suggests: digital reading vs printed reading. Its purpose is to showcase the major studies about digital reading that were conducted in the past years, this topic is relevant because as stated by Liu (2012) “Digital reading is an important research topic in contemporary information science research.” The article proved that despite the majority having a traditional attachment to print, digital media still bears more advantages and is more flexible than print media; however, there were some errors and inappropriate material that made the article not comprehensive and concise.

This article started with its abstract that contained: purpose, approach, findings, research limitations, practical implication, and value then it gave an introduction on how majority shifted from print to digital and it stated the thesis statement that aimed to introduce the background of digital reading, outline major research findings, and to discuss implications and future research directions. The article then moved on to its points which are the impacts of digital technology on reading, research on digital reading which contained subpoints, and then the conclusion where the author said that rather than viewing digital technology as something that harms our reading quality we should accept that technological advancement will benefit us because it will make problems today more convenient to resolve.

Attachment to Printed Media

To begin with, the factor that contributes to the traditional attachment of people to print books is the fixity feature of printed texts. The fixity feature includes the sense of ownership printed books provide, the page numbering that was not present in ebooks at that time, and the key feature, smell that books give off. It is said that the smell of printed books gives off contributes to people’s reading experience. Despite the fixity feature, there is no guarantee that this “traditional attachment” will extend up to future generations. This where the flexibility of digital media comes in since there are still lots of technological advancements to be made there is still room for improvement that will make the reading experience in digital media more convenient and preferable than printed media.

Advantages of Digital Reading

The advantages that digital reading provide are the interactiveness, non-linearity, and the rise of texts, images, audio, and videos. Digital is more interactive than print because print is only limited to words and images while digital includes not only words and images but also sounds and videos. The next advantage of digital reading comes with the rise of hyperlinks which is its non-linearity since the purpose of hyperlinks is to transfer the reader to another site that contains information that is related to the material but with this advantage also comes with its disadvantage which is people eventually getting disoriented and leading to fragmented reading.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Article

Structure-wise, there are 4 identified strengths in the article. First, is the way the author organized the article, the author was able to divide the information into well laid out parts which are the abstract, introduction, the 2 main points, then the conclusion this made the article less intimidating to read for those who are not that interested or not in the article’s topic. Second, is how it provided lots of resources with this we can say that the author did detailed research on the topic. Third, is despite the frequent use of jargon by the author he eventually defines it or gives context clues on the definition of the word, an example is stated by Liu (2012) “Fixity is instrumental to maintaining communicative stability and repeatability.” Fourth, is how the author was able to fulfill the article’s purpose which was to provide an overview of studies on digital reading that were conducted in the past years.

Despite all these identified strengths, there are also 4 weaknesses that were identified. First, is the citation neither APA or MLA was used as the citation style and throughout the paper, the citation is wrong from the in-text to the references. In the in-text, the citation was not right because the date of publishing was not included and there are also moments where the author failed to cite the original author at all. For the references; however, the author failed to put the references in alphabetical order. The second weakness is how redundant the author’s information is, an example of this can be seen as what Liu (2012) stated “Hillesund attempts to explain differences in digital reading and paper-based reading. He finds that online reading is characterized by browsing, skimming, and bouncing—that is “discontinuous and often fragmented reading.” and then the author, later on, gives another reference “Mangen’s study indicates that digital reading is dominated by shallow forms of reading (e.g., scanning and skimming), and digital text makes us read in a shallower, less focused way”(Liu, 2012) Comparing these two, they both have the same information and because of that nothing new gets introduced to the reader. Third, is the lack of background information given to the printed texts. This is considered a weakness because since the author compared and contrasted print with digital, with the amount of information that was given on print it may seem to be an unfair comparison if you compared the to the information given on digital. Fourth, is this article not being credible in today’s time. The sources used in this article were before 2012 and because of that, we can say that this article will not be credible if it is used as a reference today since there have been technological advances, opinions and statement of people may have changed from 2012 to today.

Conclusion

This article is too out-of-date to be used as a reference today but nonetheless, it still gave enough information on digital reading. It really showcased how advantageous and flexible digital media is. Suggestions are to before citing a reference make sure to double-check if the information is not similar to the information before it and also it would have been nice if the author conducted a research of his own, it could have made the article more reliable and make the author’s stand clearer. 

Works Cited

1. Liu, Ziming. 'Digital Reading.' Communications in Information Literacy, vol. 6, no. 2, 2012, pp. 204-217. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2012.6.2.4