What Does Your Brain Like Better: Paper or Ebooks? | Publishing Perspectives

Novelist Will Self has argued that the "connectivity" of the digital world could be the death knell for the "serious novel", which has high demands on the reader's attention. He posted a question about where we'll be in twenty years. "If you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If you answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth." But, he says, it might not be as simple as that. When researchers look at the differences that reading in different media take, they make a delineation between "deep reading", which is what happens when you get immersed in a text (a la Self's reading of the serious novel), and "active reading", when notes are taken in the margin or the book is set aside in order to cross-reference with another text.