My kids are in middle and high school, and they all have school-issued 13 in chromebooks. None of them have print text books, they are all online. I HATE studying with them, because of this. It is a nightmare to try to read a physics or math textbook; there is so much space taken by chrome, the book UI, etc, and the book usually displays full screen. Or, you zoom in, you can see 1 paragraph and half a figure, and can't turn the page. Then, you switch tabs back to your homework, also digital, and can't view the book. God forbid I show them how to tile the windows side by side, but even if you did, the book would be even smaller, and the hw questions run off the side and don't wrap. It is unbearable. I resort to digging out my 20+ year old college engineering and math textbooks for physical references. The kids don't seem to mind it too much, but it is all they have ever known.
You describe cheaping out for vastly inferior solution compared to what we had for centuries. Part of studying was going quickly back, switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on.
Every one of us has slightly different memorization / comprehension techniques to grok foreign text and concepts within, and this crappy cheap new tech diminishes most of them. For quick overview why not, but for deeper studies this is bad, very bad.
Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently and even here on HN many celebrated is as some sort of progress, so manufacturers aligned and are happy to save on better quality controls to keep their margins fat and juicy. Who cares about some focus or safety or long term reliability studies, look at that shiny glaring screen!
> Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently
Do they? Why are physical controls back?
It seems like car manufacturers just mindlessly jumped on what they thought was a fad, without ever bothering to test out their own cars.
I think you are right, together with the opportunities for cost-saving and cheaply-implemented upselling.
And it is not as if physical controls are ipso facto better. I have driven a number of cars with physical controls that are hard to find and distinguish between, and which function modally.
Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better, there's decades of studies to support that. Especially in situations where you need to use touch to maintain visual focus elsewhere.
> Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better...
I'm not sure what you are trying to say with the 'just' there - if they were ipso facto better, that would be about as strong an affirmation of their superiority as one could make.
Nothing I wrote contradicts the claim that a well-designed manual control is better than a touch control, and that is, in fact, a view that I agree with. The fact, however, that I have increasingly come across manual controls having the very vice that you seem to be alluding to - one needs to visually find them, operate them, or check their status, taking one's eyes off the road - shows that they are not ipso facto better.
Are you perhaps mistaking ipso facto for prima facie?
What happened to the field of ergonomics? Why is the modern/digital world so disconnected from the human form and the way people actually work and use things?
Modern electronics is rife with this shitty ergonomics, it's everywhere—from rotten screen GUIs (or GUIs that change with every release—witness Microsoft Windows) to pushbutton volume controls with little or no tactile feedback instead of proper rotary potentiometers, and so on.
I know in many instances it's cheaper but a rotary potentiometer is cheaper than a screen. A rotary knob for a volume control is much easier to use—and much safer too when used in a vehicle.
I've come to the conclusion that designers of digital electronics simply don't know enough about analog electronics and or analog interfaces to design the stuff, it seems the word 'analog' has been stricken from their vocabulary, and or they're too timid to attempt such designs. Perhaps they're frightened of being criticized by colleagues who are even more stupid than they are.
What else can it be? The human hand is exquisitely designed to rotate a knob (evolution suggests we humans evolved thus to twist fruit off trees).
Same issue with pushbutton switches, without decent tactile feedback one's never sure if the function has been completed. Gamers use proper mechanical switch keyboards because they can achieve much, much greater speed and precision than they can with this crappy 'lifeless' stuff.
The modern electronic junk is just so much harder to use, product design has actually gone backwards. The ergonomics of old-fashioned radios and HiFis were perfect in this regard with their rotary potentiometers and clunky switchs.
If you are a designer of this junk and reading this then shame on you! Ask yourself why the hell are you so incompetent that you cannot give users designs that they both want and are easy to use.
Purely analogue controls like potentiometers went out of fashion because controlling for things like judder, slight creep, dead-zones, and of course physical wear and tear were big enough problems. Case in point: even the cheapest new joysticks for flight simulators have moved to Hall effect sensors, and many knobs have moved to rotary detented encoders.
This change happened in real jet airliners too. A press of the rudder pedal or a swing of the joystick/yoke no longer directly pulls on cables and pulleys to directly manipulate control surfaces. Instead, nearly all modern jet airliners use fly-by-wire where control deflections are encoded, and sent digitally to hydraulic actuators on control surfaces.
Hence, UX designers and engineers could still make analogue-like controls with switches, knobs, physical push-buttons, etc and still have a digital back-end. In fact this is exactly what car manufacturers did in the mid-2000s to late 2010s, with the CAN bus and all. Controls were physical, but a shift of the knob to the previous or next detent would trigger an electromagnetic switch of some sort to send a digital signal instead of relying on the physical position of the knob.
I'd say ~2020 and the W223 Mercedes-Benz S-class was the turning point for extravagantly and pointlessly large screens in cars.
In a pdf book, what I am really missing is the spacial position of a piece of knowledge. Particularly for reference books (I am an engineer, I still have a large amount of reference books) I look up on a regular basis, I know/remember where I need to search without the need to express it in words to run a search through a 1000+ page book.
But, maybe I am just an old guy and this is just because I learnt this way.
Maybe the new generation is learning directly "digital" with other knowledge access mechanisms. For example, I intuitively store a "position" in the book, maybe they intuitively remember a "keyword" to search for in the book.
There are good PDF viewers (e.g. MuPDF), where you need only a minimum of movements for going to a page, e.g. pressing "719g" in order to go to page 719.
Even when a PDF file does not have bookmarks and even when I do not remember the exact page where something is located, I can still know for instance that what I am looking for is about 20% before the end of the book, so if the book has 1400 pages I go quickly to page 1120 and I search around.
With a good PDF viewer I can navigate through a book much faster than I can turn the pages in a physical book.
Nevertheless, one needs to have a big high-resolution monitor in order to come close to the quality of a printed book. The current 4k monitors are a huge progress over the older 1080p or 1440p monitors, but their resolution is still insufficient to match that required to render correctly some of the typefaces that were popular for high-quality printing (but which have been rarely used after the transition to digital typefaces, being replaced by others more tolerant to low-resolution rendering).
Because I read a lot of books, there are almost 10 years since I have last used a display with a resolution less than 4k and I have always used them only at their native resolution. I cannot understand why some people choose to use various scaling methods to make the text big enough (but ugly), instead of doing the right thing, i.e. the rendering of all typefaces at the maximum available resolution, but choosing their dimension in points big enough for comfortable reading (after setting the monitor dots-per-inch value to the true value for the connected monitor).
I agree with your points about PDFs. But what about reflowable formats? The only constant is the rough percentage of where the information might lie. This is a sorry second to a PDF/printed text that also maintains the layout.
Reflowable formats like HTML are a regression over traditional books and I consider them as unsuitable for any document longer than a few pages.
I really hate those who provide some technical documentation in HTML format, without offering a PDF alternative, or at least some other worse format, like EPUB, but which still allows a book-like navigation.
Even on the small display of my phone I still prefer to read books in PDF format, if the reader provides a good UI for pan and zoom, than to read reflowable HTML documents, because with the latter the unpredictability of the layout messes with my ability to remember the location of the information of interest, which is essential when I frequently have to navigate through very long documents.
I like both. Fixed format is great for spatial navigation, diagrams and table (and PDFs usually are better typeset). But for primarily text books (fictions,...) and references, I will take reflowable formats. Both for reading on an eReader (nice on the eyes) and for quick navigation when browsing references (a strong point there for hyperlinks).
Just wanted to drop in to say that this take reveals a blind spot with respect to visual impairment. Reflowability is really vital for visually impaired people who can still see enough to read.
Panning in two dimensions is very cumbersome and brutally inefficient compared to scrolling in just one direction, especially if you have to much of it. If you can only fit a few lines of readable text on your screen at a time, it's really painful to pan across a fixed layout.
(It's been my experience that PDFs are generally not as helpful to accessibility tools as HTML or similar formats can be, as well.)
All of this is exacerbated on displays with slow redraw as well, like e-ink. In the end, I don't even attempt to read comic books or fixed-layout textbooks on my e-readers, for instance. Nobody makes color e-readers big enough for me to read those things comfortably. And my vision is still pretty good— I don't necessarily use fullscreen zoom every day at work and I can still drive.
> the unpredictability of the layout messes with my ability to remember the location of the information of interest
Although technically the layout is fixed, navigation of fixed-layout zoom can itself feel quite unpredictable if you are also using fullscreen zoom, because now you have two layers of independent 2D panning, and all the while your viewport is only a fraction of the screen (in some cases even just 10% of it or much less). At that point, if you're looking at text, you can't see literally any UI elements, just the text. No display corners, no window borders, no title bars, no menu bar, no start menu. All of that spatial positioning you like to navigate by becomes state you have to keep track of in your head, your view of which is updated infrequently at best and only ever partially.
There's also nothing in principle stopping you from using a layout-preserving zoom on reflowable pages. Chrome and Firefox both support this, for instance. By the same token and without loss of generality, you're perfectly free to fix your browser's zoom level and your browser window's size in pixels. It's also trivial to convert HTML to PDF with any of a number of free tools that are easy to get. In contrast PDFs often make spatial navigation the only possible way to navigate, and converting the other way is much harder.
All that said...
> I really hate those who provide some technical documentation in HTML format, without offering [alternatives]
I completely agree with this. Accessibility is intimately related to flexibility, hackability, and ultimately, freedom. Docs should be provided in a way that doesn't assume or support only one way of reading/browsing/working.
I have a pet peeve kinda similar to your complaint, too: I hate it when tools have HTML docs (or even just READMEs or usage messages) but no manpage. Other formats often come in handy for me, too, but I want to be able to view the docs where I'm already using the tool, dammit!
In study sessions in school I would sometimes look things up by thinking "it was on the lower left about this far into the book." I remember studies done years ago that showed reading a physical book improved memory and learning due to the geometry and positioning reinforcing the neural paths, and anecdotally that was definitely the case for me. I don't think I'm hallucinating them, this article cites several studies that support that. Anyone who suggests PDFs are just as good "because they have pages" is missing the point - they aren't physical objects, and that matters.
PDFs have pages, and I usually find that I remember about which page something is on in a PDF I am reffering to as I do when it is printed or in a book. I definitely think there is lots of oppurtunity to improve the UX, but there a a lot of advantages to electronic presentation.
This is exactly the reason I dislike reflowable formats. Younger people don’t seem to appreciate the benefits of the spatial position of information within a PDF/printed text. As an undergrad, by the time I finished a textbook chapter, I would have both the information and the general spatial layout of the text committed to memory. The latter greatly helped recall and cognitive integration. 30 years later, I can still pick up my undergrad textbook, dimly recall where the information is located, and quickly get back up to speed. The human brain has a powerful spatial ‘muscle memory’ for recalling information. This is lost when dealing with .mobi and .epub formats.
But none of that mitigates the problem of screen real estate. Maybe I'm just an old but I like to see more of the page.
The Chromebooks, do they have a jack for a second monitor? A good sized monitor could take care of a lot of these problems. Even better would be if they can also put books, pdfs etc. on an iPad for reading.
If I'm going to stay at a particular place for working, I want at least 24" in screen areas. 4K if I'm going to stare at text. An iPad works great if you're reading only or working on the document itself (annotation). Not so great for quick browsing.
> switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on.
Any PDF reader I've used will do those things, iirc.
> I can fold or flip a page so, that I can quickly view certain parts of the second page while I read the first one.
With PDFs, you can open it in as many windows as you like and arrange them for simultaneous viewing on your screen. Open a copy on another device too if you like.
I'm not saying books have no advantage, just not for those functions IMHO.
I've never driven a Tesla, but don't they have voice activation? Can't you say "hey Tesla, reduce AC to low"? I totally agree that tactile feedback is superior to tapping a screen, but if it had accurate voice activation that would be almost as good for me (once I got used to the weirdness of talking to the car like Knight Rider)
They have and they are more than accurate enough even if you're not a native speaker.
It's just unwilling to learn/change.
Saw an Audi today which is same physical size and price range to a Tesla model 3.
It was down right funny how much useless crap it has on the dashboard, how bad it looks and how claustrophobic it feels compared to model 3.
But why should they be willing to change? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you claiming the users should just meekly accept change for the sake of change, and never complain?
To the great of my then teachers, I used to scribble and write equations on my table while studying. I had paper, but for some reason I just loved doing math directly on the table.
I was told off for it often, but I don't think I would have liked math as much as I did if I didn't have that option.
I recently took a CS101 class that used ZyBooks for the textbook and absolutely hated it for this very reason [1].
The "reading" was basically a bunch of mandatory checkbox exercises that turn into a slog through a bunch of slow-loading prompts that were just "Click Next" to receive confirmation that I had read the info in the prompts.
Your old textbooks are probably better too. I remember when I was taking high school chemistry, the then-current textbooks were awful with garish boxes of blocks of colour taking up half the page, font changes, screaming blurbs, etc.
I went to a store and bought the previous older edition of the textbook which was still the same material but without the fad of making everything visually distracting. It is very refreshing to just be able to read a normal flat white page with normal black, blue and red ink.
Yeah. I haven't seen much in the way of modern textbooks but what I have seen tends to be full of garbage. Back when I was in school I couldn't stand used textbooks because they would contain someone else's highlighting and I found that very disruptive. I hate predigested garbage!
We are not alone in that. My wife has some reference books in Chinese that I believe date from the 80s. They are printed on some rather cheap materials. She was trying to find some new ones--and has failed completely. I can't read them, let alone evaluate the usefulness, but she was appalled at what she found and continues to use her taped-together stuff.
Glad to know I am not the only parent who feels this way.
On a personal note, I am one of those people who highlights sections of text books using different coloured markers and scribbled notes on the margins. During my final exam time, my revision of materials was very efficient. I am not sure how to teach my kids these skills.
You can try to teach them to use a good pdf reader. At work there are a lot of Google doc to review. I always convert them to PDF so that I can have private annotations, named bookmarks and highlights of different colors (I can even diff between two versions). This way I am building a collection of PDF I can locally search.
On this topic, computers are great to make flashcards. Instead of the paragrahed notes, when learning material, I am taking note in the form of short Q&A using markdown flashcards. Works great for me. Easy to review efficiently, easy to extend.
This said, I am not sure this is adapted to kids. Hope you share your skills to your kids.
Ever had the experience that your favorite shoes or watch is discontinued by the manufacturer? It sucks because you’re back on the consumer treadmill again, wasting time and money on things that aren’t as good and struggling with an annoying distraction that previously did not exist while you try to find something that works for you again.
Software churn is just like this, only much worse. It should/could have been different, but it’s not.
So no, I don’t really think we should take away all books, buttons, and knobs that offer a reasonably consistent user experience and replace everything we can with software and tablets. At least not until software learns to behave. Reading is as basic as tying your shoes. Would you really want SV PMs in charge of revolutionizing the shoe-tying experience every quarter, or dropping updates on you that change the place you’ve always stored your shoes?
Relearning is fine if that’s on the way to a new stable state, but I just don’t see that happening. The fact that people are discussing the best pdf reader after like 2+ decades of widespread usage, or the fact that signing a pdf often means rebooting into a different OS or using a cloud service that just wants a look at what kind of stuff you’re signing just totally destroys the idea that this tech is working for us.
Further, does anyone believe that pdfs are going to fix something like textbook costs? You will still pay too much for something that you don’t really own now and cannot share or loan out, etc. Savings for the publisher or distributor cabals are not going to find their way to end users, or if they do then this will certainly be a temporary situation. They already know how much they can charge and get away with it, so…
I’m far from a Luddite, but just know that tech is great to the extent that it gets out of the way and lets us focus on things we care about. Corporate tech is the opposite though, because it always wants engagement, feeding, maintenance. PDFs and chrome books that empty out your backpack might look like a convenience for students but who really benefits? The people that push Chromebooks get a captive audience of tax payers and children who are future android fans, the distributors that can empty their warehouses and fire a forklift driver, etc.
Business as usual.. everyone should think critically about it when someone is telling them “these changes are for your own good”.
Not the same person but I would suggest using zotero for this purpose. This is one of the best use case of zotero (try zotero 7 beta). Combined with its iPad app you will find it can tick all your requirements.
I recently went back to school and started using Zotero again. Reading and annotating books and papers on iPad, and then having access to all of my notes when writing on desktop is such a simple but amazing feature.
On Linux, I use zathura (but I rarely annotate my PDFs and I use my iPad for that). On macOS, I used Preview (it was good enough) and PDF Expert (Not the subscription version) for editing pages and outline. On the iPad, I begrudgingly use Documents (by readdle).
My PDF are managed by Calibre, but I export various subsets to the file system, so I can find them easily (on the network).
I highly recommend trying out sioyek (as a zathura replacement). it has a bunch of features that make it even more suitable for consuming technical papers/textbooks - such as a significantly faster search & index, an auto generated table of contents, highlights, and portals.
I have this problem right since i got my first tab during ny bachelors. Given how expensive books are, I have had temptation to just buy 3-4 10inch kindles and wing it. Also, it's very important that kids use their hands to write even if they don't actually turn in handwritten work. The act of even just doodling while thinking has been shown to be extremely beneficial
Just out of curiosity, have you heard of the Remarkable Paper Pro? I just got one and it's decent at the writing experience. Probably even good. But currently it's basically only for writing, you can export PDF or png to an email or their cloud. You can write on imported pdfs as well.
I know; I was fortunate as a student to have a Gateway convertible(yay complicated hinge mechanism) laptop with a 4 year warranty. It was okay with notes (I did really love OneNote but portability of those notes was not good), and right before the end of the warranty period the hinge failed so they replaced it entirely. It was actually more expensive than the rm paper pro and I would relish the opportunity to have it back then. Granted, it was also a full Windows laptop too, which the paper pro is decidedly not.
One of my children is a maths undergrad (UK) and all their texts are on-line too. He's in a minority in that he uses the library and borrows books. Many of his cohort don't.
On one hand, I remember how costly textbooks were and I'm glad he doesn't have that. But I still have some of my student textbooks and its interesting to flip through them and see old margin notes, and consider what has and hasn't changed over thirty years.
Books are better in book form for one simple reason: Spatiality and tactility. Skimming, skipping pages, marking and jumping between different parts of the book. These actions are all extremely easy, intuitive and convenient with a paper book. There's no replacement for digital books. Using a mouse means you're no longer interacting directly with the medium and even if you do use a touchscreen, digital books aren't designed to be used or interacted with in any sane way.
Paper books have excellent UI, far better than ebooks in most respects. I wish ebooks at least came close to matching them, because the damn things are bulky and heavy.
I've found that printing can help a lot in these situations. While you can't always print everything, math notes and scratch work are still much easier on paper, no digital solution has fully replaced that yet! The article is focused on reading, but I recall previous discussions on the neurological aspects of writing and motor control, where much of our brain is linked to muscle control and dexterity [1].
This study [Mangen, Walgermo and Brønnick (2012)] should be replicated with adult subjects and N=500 instead of just N=72 kids from a single class.
In Sweden, based on similar results sub-notebooks and tables that were only recently introduced were removed again. I respect the Swedish for reacting on the new evidence instead of being in denial that the purchase of so much hardware was a mistake.
I write, read, and review scientific papers throughout the year, and most of the time, I will print them out (sometimes over one hundred pages for a single conference - e.g. 10 papers a 10 pages). The clearest benefit is reading mathematical formulae on paper vs screen, from my subjective experience, but also the ability to scribble notes, turn back the page to re-read something to double-check without much effort.
As much as I like computers, paper is the most ingenious medium ever invented by humankind, and the second most
durable w.r.t. long-term preservation of the written word (after parchment).
> the ability to scribble notes, turn back the page to re-read something to double-check without much effort.
I agree 100%. The simple act of turning back the page/pages is so fast and efficient. My brain seems to even remember where on the page the info I want is. So much more is visible in a single 'eye-shot'. I don't get that same mental experience with e-docs - not sure why. I did grow up with paper so there is a bias.
I had not thought about the paging-back issue until you mentioned it, but I recognize in myself what you have said about it. Our brains and sensorimotor systems are developed for direct interaction with the physical world, not through proxies (though we can get pretty good with decent proxies through practice.)
On the other hand, being able to search is invaluable, as is the ability to have the footnote pages open in a separate window, if the software does not provide a better option. Finally, I can't imagine a good interface that is not pencil-like for sketching diagrams.
I agree. For novels, digital works well—I have hundreds of books on my Kindle. But recently, while studying a math book, I bought the paperback for exactly the reason you mentioned.
I agree that for the act of learning, the tactility of paper is a huge benefit. But for preserving and recalling notes and highlights, electronic wins. I can have hundreds of books or papers on whichever device I'm on and look up notes and annotations I've made over several years.
I've tried figuring out how to get the best of both worlds, but maybe you really just need to decide which trade-off to go with.
To me paper has a huge advantage for skipping around, but in every other context I prefer the screen assuming it's big enough. Things like Kindles and phones are only good for text that works fine reflowed and where you don't need to keep looking back as you read.
The screen would also benefit from something I have never seen used: Have a second window that shows whatever images, graphs etc (pretty much anything that's not just words in a row) are relevant to whatever is currently displayed in the main window.
> paper is the most ingenious medium ever invented by humankind, and the second most durable w.r.t. long-term preservation of the written word (after parchment).
As someone who spent 6 years at the uni in the first half of 2000’s having access to the mixture of printed and digital materials, and as someone who has to read tons of different formal and informal docs on a daily basis, I can firmly say I don’t care about the results of this study and at least they are irrelevant to me. You need to get your tasks done, research and learn anything? Use whatever medium is available and fits your needs best and allows you to yield better results in a shorter timespan.
I won’t bother printing some programming language documentation and I miss the ability to search through text in printed books.
That being said, printed books smell good, and I enjoy the typographic excellence of them every time I grab a real book.
In somewhat delicious irony, I find this PDF almost unreadable on my iPhone screen due to the tiny font.
Hah: “The students were randomized into two groups, where the first group read two texts (1400–2000 words) in print, and the other group read the same texts as PDF on a computer screen.”
Maybe they should try the experiment again using a non-hostile format for presenting information on a computer.
(In case anyone else was wondering about resolution, this 2012 study used 15” LCDs at 1280x1024 running Windows XP - so definitely not retina.)
I believe digital reading could be more benifitial if better media were applied. This 2012 study invited "72 tenth graders read texts as PDF on a computer screen", which is simply bad.
For example, people spent hours exploring wikipedia, this could never be done with physical paper. I often find myself looking for Ctrl+F button holding a book. Interactive textbooks were posted on HN many times, like you can alter a numerical input and see graphs chaning in real time. This helps a lot for kids with limited imagination.
These days I can't live without an AI assistant. While reading, it's just so convenient just to ask. The AI might be wrong from time to time, so keep a critical mind, the AI is immensely helpful for foreign-language materials and complex acedemical papers.
>For example, people spent hours exploring wikipedia, this could never be done with physical paper.
I must not understand what you're saying here. I'm envisioning someone reading an article, seeing a reference to something unfamiliar, then stopping to read another article in a nearby source about that thing or any other random topic, recursing for hours. This is easily done, and often was by children a few decades ago, with any encyclopedia set.
> This is easily done ... with any encyclopedia set
I get your point, the problem is that, a good set of encyclopedia is NOT available to every household everytime, it takes lots of space and storage. You can't go to a park with a set of encyclopedia, on the other hand, an iPad with offline wikipedia, navigating by clicking links is much, much easier than stacking many, many opened books on your fixed desk.
Plausible result, but considering that this HN post is appearing on the same day as one of the top posts is about scientific fraud… let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I say it all the time: provocative experimental results should be considered fraudulent until the raw data is shared, and then spurious until replicated.
I would put this only slightly differently: experimental results should be considered unpublishable without the raw data, and irrelevant until replicated.
Maybe somewhat related but I also find that if I'm taking notes, I retain things much better if I handwrite them. Often I don't even need to refer to my handwritten notes because I can remember them, which is almost never the case with typed notes.
And interestingly, it's specifically handwritten notes in pen. When I use a pencil it's much more like just typing them out.
Yes, this is me as well. Reading on paper is so much easier and faster for me, and my reading comprehension is substantially higher as compared to reading on a screen. Even an e-paper screen.
I had long thought that this is because I'm old enough that for a huge portion of my life, most of my reading was on paper and people a generation or two younger than my wouldn't see the same disparity. This paper, however, seems to indicate that this may not be the whole story.
I find reading texts on a 13 inch (3200x1800, 276 ppi) laptop easier to remember than on a 42 inch (3840x2160, 104 ppi) monitor. Reading takes more effort as text isn't as clear on the big screen.
Been waiting for 42 inch 8k monitors since 2017. There's a 55 inch IPS on the horizon (ASRock PG558KF).
Does anyone have experience reading text on 8K VA panels like Samsung QN700B?
I think there comes a point where a monitor is too big, at least if it's not curved. But a 276ppi monitor would bother me--nice for the text, but controls don't seamlessly adjust for ppi and typically do not adjust at all.
This machine has one 27" monitor that I frequently use for games, video etc, but that's pretty much all I use it for, rarely do I do text based things on it.
27 inch 4K screen is a reasonable compromise, I find (163 ppi). Display scaling is a must, but same on laptop display.
I guess a larger screen is like having more pages on your desk at once.
I feel like I've known this intuitively for years, but have never been able to properly explain it to others.
For example, when I was in university (2015-20), all my lecture notes were available as pdfs, but I would just always print them anyway while the other students would read them on their devices. And when I learned French, I only bought physical books and never even once tried an e-reader. Paper is just easier to understand!
Search the study for "ink," this is discussed briefly. They produce less visual fatigue than regular screens because they reflect ambient light rather than relying entirely on being backlit.
In terms of comprehension the hierarchy probably goes paper > e-ink > all other screens. Hard to quantify the gap between each.
I think this is a big point to consider: we've known for a long time that taking notes increases recall to a degree that likely dwarfs this screen vs paper thing. There are studies where it's like a 7-8x improvement in recall which is tied to comprehension.
So if you want to actually remember and learn from stuff, definitely take notes. Preferably handwritten ones. Preferably do it all on paper. But the key is really to just be taking notes.
Lastly there is also the argument that doing anything is better than nothing. Some people aren't going to get through any books at all if they're not audiobooks, so, they should keep on listening to audiobooks, even if comprehension or recall might not be as good that way. Personally I've been on a hardcover books kick recently, I've found I just get a lot of satisfaction out of reading a proper, high quality hardcover book from start to finish, alone or with a loved one, preferably with a cup of tea, so that's what I'm now doing.
> we've known for a long time that taking notes increases recall to a degree that likely dwarfs this screen vs paper thing
Bit of anecdata that agrees with you here - a few years back I bought a decent colour e-ink android tablet (Onyx Boox). My intent was that I was going to totally use it for reading through journal papers without needing to print them out, regular ebook reading, etc etc.
The VAST MAJORITY of what I have used it for, to date, is the note taking app. Like, not notes scribbled over whatever I'm reading.. just notes.
The act of doodling notes in meetings and training and classes and when problem-solving definitely aids my [lack of] working memory and I definitely see how making notes improves comprehension.
I bought a book replacement and it became a notepad replacement :)
I too have found myself preferring a good solid actual book when it comes to reading, too. Ebooks just miss something tactile. I suppose that highlights when reading becomes an activity with intent, as opposed to something you feel you have to do.
My own personal experience is I hate reading any long form material on a computer or tablet screen. Something about the experience was both painful and didn’t seem to work with how I read. I bought a used e-reader on a lark at a flea market to try it out and picked up reading as a hobby again. Even with the newer backlit e-readers the experience is much different.
As a first guess I would say:
* “Paper like” looks, including slightly blurred text (since e-ink pixels aren’t square)
* Mostly reflective lighting and softer lighting when backlit
* Dedicated and simple UI
* Perhaps most importantly singly consumable, individual and discrete chunks of readable text
Are all factors in making this a better experience. E-pubs that can reflow their text and so that each “page” is rendered legibly and in full are great experiences. Reading fixed format PDFs is better than on a tablet but not as good as an epub
I have, and still find normal computer screens to just not work for reading long form content for me, even reading an epub in an epub app on a normal computer screen/tablet still feels off
My hypothesis is that the PDF format bears much blame here. The results might be
very different if the material is in a reflowable format like an epub or a web page.
If you think about it, the notion of a page exists only because of the physical
limitations of the paper medium, and PDF is page-centric only because it was designed
to represent printable materials. There's no reason to stick to pages anymore if
the material is to be consumed on a screen, and PDF is therefore also the wrong
choice for this.
I've been reading digital image processing by Gonzalez and I must be honest: the sheer thickness of the book makes it very hard to handle (especially lying in bed). As others pointed out already, I do miss the ability of search the text. Good book though
I'm a book person through and through. Crafting Interpreters is an example of how a textbook can be when someone really puts the effort in, I know there's also a free PDF version but the paper book is well worth the price.
E-readers like the remarkable are getting closer, but that one's banned by some of our clients until they hire someone who understands security.
I would love to know what happens with e-ink devices then. I feel this test is doing many things at once and the conclusion may not carry to e-ink (it's easier in the eyes, you can scribble...)
I mostly stopped reading paper books, as I do almost all book reading through Libby app on my tablet that has a high resolution display like most tablets produced in the past few years. It's a superior experience than a paper book in almost every way.
At work and home, with 4k monitor, it's so much easier to put multiple reading materials side by side and read / research across.
In 2012, even on the state of the art computer systems, the reading experience wasn't as good as it is now.
A typical textbook gives me around an 11x17 display area with better than retina resolution and a refresh limited only by the speed of my optic nerve.
That’s about the usable area of a 27” monitor after all the UI trash has taken its share of space.
And of course, it leaves my monitor free for practicing whatever it is I’m trying to learn from the book. Alt tabbing is a terrible experience comparatively. Glancing at the text takes the time of a saccade and uses visual memory, leaving my short term memory free for concepts and working memory.
Obviously get a good book holder that you can stand next to your monitor(s).
I've only read the abstract. One thing I would like to read about is, if the phenomenon is real what's the mechanism for it. Is it that people on screen have the tendency to change tab to look at memes every other paragraph? Is it that they associate screens with entertainment, and even without acting on it the brain gets too lazy? Or what?
My kids are in middle and high school, and they all have school-issued 13 in chromebooks. None of them have print text books, they are all online. I HATE studying with them, because of this. It is a nightmare to try to read a physics or math textbook; there is so much space taken by chrome, the book UI, etc, and the book usually displays full screen. Or, you zoom in, you can see 1 paragraph and half a figure, and can't turn the page. Then, you switch tabs back to your homework, also digital, and can't view the book. God forbid I show them how to tile the windows side by side, but even if you did, the book would be even smaller, and the hw questions run off the side and don't wrap. It is unbearable. I resort to digging out my 20+ year old college engineering and math textbooks for physical references. The kids don't seem to mind it too much, but it is all they have ever known.
You describe cheaping out for vastly inferior solution compared to what we had for centuries. Part of studying was going quickly back, switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on.
Every one of us has slightly different memorization / comprehension techniques to grok foreign text and concepts within, and this crappy cheap new tech diminishes most of them. For quick overview why not, but for deeper studies this is bad, very bad.
Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently and even here on HN many celebrated is as some sort of progress, so manufacturers aligned and are happy to save on better quality controls to keep their margins fat and juicy. Who cares about some focus or safety or long term reliability studies, look at that shiny glaring screen!
> Just like I hated when Tesla started putting some crappy tablet instead of physical knobs, for vastly inferior driver experience. But masses clearly think differently
Do they? Why are physical controls back?
It seems like car manufacturers just mindlessly jumped on what they thought was a fad, without ever bothering to test out their own cars.
I think you are right, together with the opportunities for cost-saving and cheaply-implemented upselling.
And it is not as if physical controls are ipso facto better. I have driven a number of cars with physical controls that are hard to find and distinguish between, and which function modally.
Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better, there's decades of studies to support that. Especially in situations where you need to use touch to maintain visual focus elsewhere.
> Physical controls aren't just ipso facto better...
I'm not sure what you are trying to say with the 'just' there - if they were ipso facto better, that would be about as strong an affirmation of their superiority as one could make.
Nothing I wrote contradicts the claim that a well-designed manual control is better than a touch control, and that is, in fact, a view that I agree with. The fact, however, that I have increasingly come across manual controls having the very vice that you seem to be alluding to - one needs to visually find them, operate them, or check their status, taking one's eyes off the road - shows that they are not ipso facto better.
Are you perhaps mistaking ipso facto for prima facie?
"crappy tablet instead of physical knobs,…"
What happened to the field of ergonomics? Why is the modern/digital world so disconnected from the human form and the way people actually work and use things?
Modern electronics is rife with this shitty ergonomics, it's everywhere—from rotten screen GUIs (or GUIs that change with every release—witness Microsoft Windows) to pushbutton volume controls with little or no tactile feedback instead of proper rotary potentiometers, and so on.
I know in many instances it's cheaper but a rotary potentiometer is cheaper than a screen. A rotary knob for a volume control is much easier to use—and much safer too when used in a vehicle.
I've come to the conclusion that designers of digital electronics simply don't know enough about analog electronics and or analog interfaces to design the stuff, it seems the word 'analog' has been stricken from their vocabulary, and or they're too timid to attempt such designs. Perhaps they're frightened of being criticized by colleagues who are even more stupid than they are.
What else can it be? The human hand is exquisitely designed to rotate a knob (evolution suggests we humans evolved thus to twist fruit off trees).
Same issue with pushbutton switches, without decent tactile feedback one's never sure if the function has been completed. Gamers use proper mechanical switch keyboards because they can achieve much, much greater speed and precision than they can with this crappy 'lifeless' stuff.
The modern electronic junk is just so much harder to use, product design has actually gone backwards. The ergonomics of old-fashioned radios and HiFis were perfect in this regard with their rotary potentiometers and clunky switchs.
If you are a designer of this junk and reading this then shame on you! Ask yourself why the hell are you so incompetent that you cannot give users designs that they both want and are easy to use.
> rotary potentiometers
Purely analogue controls like potentiometers went out of fashion because controlling for things like judder, slight creep, dead-zones, and of course physical wear and tear were big enough problems. Case in point: even the cheapest new joysticks for flight simulators have moved to Hall effect sensors, and many knobs have moved to rotary detented encoders.
This change happened in real jet airliners too. A press of the rudder pedal or a swing of the joystick/yoke no longer directly pulls on cables and pulleys to directly manipulate control surfaces. Instead, nearly all modern jet airliners use fly-by-wire where control deflections are encoded, and sent digitally to hydraulic actuators on control surfaces.
Hence, UX designers and engineers could still make analogue-like controls with switches, knobs, physical push-buttons, etc and still have a digital back-end. In fact this is exactly what car manufacturers did in the mid-2000s to late 2010s, with the CAN bus and all. Controls were physical, but a shift of the knob to the previous or next detent would trigger an electromagnetic switch of some sort to send a digital signal instead of relying on the physical position of the knob.
I'd say ~2020 and the W223 Mercedes-Benz S-class was the turning point for extravagantly and pointlessly large screens in cars.
> Part of studying was going quickly back, switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on.
Whatever the other trade-offs, you can do all that even more easily with a good PDF application.
You also can open multiple instances of the same book, to have multiple pages open simultaneously.
In a pdf book, what I am really missing is the spacial position of a piece of knowledge. Particularly for reference books (I am an engineer, I still have a large amount of reference books) I look up on a regular basis, I know/remember where I need to search without the need to express it in words to run a search through a 1000+ page book.
But, maybe I am just an old guy and this is just because I learnt this way.
Maybe the new generation is learning directly "digital" with other knowledge access mechanisms. For example, I intuitively store a "position" in the book, maybe they intuitively remember a "keyword" to search for in the book.
As another poster said, PDF files have pages.
There are good PDF viewers (e.g. MuPDF), where you need only a minimum of movements for going to a page, e.g. pressing "719g" in order to go to page 719.
Even when a PDF file does not have bookmarks and even when I do not remember the exact page where something is located, I can still know for instance that what I am looking for is about 20% before the end of the book, so if the book has 1400 pages I go quickly to page 1120 and I search around.
With a good PDF viewer I can navigate through a book much faster than I can turn the pages in a physical book.
Nevertheless, one needs to have a big high-resolution monitor in order to come close to the quality of a printed book. The current 4k monitors are a huge progress over the older 1080p or 1440p monitors, but their resolution is still insufficient to match that required to render correctly some of the typefaces that were popular for high-quality printing (but which have been rarely used after the transition to digital typefaces, being replaced by others more tolerant to low-resolution rendering).
Because I read a lot of books, there are almost 10 years since I have last used a display with a resolution less than 4k and I have always used them only at their native resolution. I cannot understand why some people choose to use various scaling methods to make the text big enough (but ugly), instead of doing the right thing, i.e. the rendering of all typefaces at the maximum available resolution, but choosing their dimension in points big enough for comfortable reading (after setting the monitor dots-per-inch value to the true value for the connected monitor).
Adobe renders fonts much better on a 4k monitor. Way more expensive but way better rendering fonts.
I agree with your points about PDFs. But what about reflowable formats? The only constant is the rough percentage of where the information might lie. This is a sorry second to a PDF/printed text that also maintains the layout.
Reflowable formats like HTML are a regression over traditional books and I consider them as unsuitable for any document longer than a few pages.
I really hate those who provide some technical documentation in HTML format, without offering a PDF alternative, or at least some other worse format, like EPUB, but which still allows a book-like navigation.
Even on the small display of my phone I still prefer to read books in PDF format, if the reader provides a good UI for pan and zoom, than to read reflowable HTML documents, because with the latter the unpredictability of the layout messes with my ability to remember the location of the information of interest, which is essential when I frequently have to navigate through very long documents.
I like both. Fixed format is great for spatial navigation, diagrams and table (and PDFs usually are better typeset). But for primarily text books (fictions,...) and references, I will take reflowable formats. Both for reading on an eReader (nice on the eyes) and for quick navigation when browsing references (a strong point there for hyperlinks).
Just wanted to drop in to say that this take reveals a blind spot with respect to visual impairment. Reflowability is really vital for visually impaired people who can still see enough to read.
Panning in two dimensions is very cumbersome and brutally inefficient compared to scrolling in just one direction, especially if you have to much of it. If you can only fit a few lines of readable text on your screen at a time, it's really painful to pan across a fixed layout.
(It's been my experience that PDFs are generally not as helpful to accessibility tools as HTML or similar formats can be, as well.)
All of this is exacerbated on displays with slow redraw as well, like e-ink. In the end, I don't even attempt to read comic books or fixed-layout textbooks on my e-readers, for instance. Nobody makes color e-readers big enough for me to read those things comfortably. And my vision is still pretty good— I don't necessarily use fullscreen zoom every day at work and I can still drive.
> the unpredictability of the layout messes with my ability to remember the location of the information of interest
Although technically the layout is fixed, navigation of fixed-layout zoom can itself feel quite unpredictable if you are also using fullscreen zoom, because now you have two layers of independent 2D panning, and all the while your viewport is only a fraction of the screen (in some cases even just 10% of it or much less). At that point, if you're looking at text, you can't see literally any UI elements, just the text. No display corners, no window borders, no title bars, no menu bar, no start menu. All of that spatial positioning you like to navigate by becomes state you have to keep track of in your head, your view of which is updated infrequently at best and only ever partially.
There's also nothing in principle stopping you from using a layout-preserving zoom on reflowable pages. Chrome and Firefox both support this, for instance. By the same token and without loss of generality, you're perfectly free to fix your browser's zoom level and your browser window's size in pixels. It's also trivial to convert HTML to PDF with any of a number of free tools that are easy to get. In contrast PDFs often make spatial navigation the only possible way to navigate, and converting the other way is much harder.
All that said...
> I really hate those who provide some technical documentation in HTML format, without offering [alternatives]
I completely agree with this. Accessibility is intimately related to flexibility, hackability, and ultimately, freedom. Docs should be provided in a way that doesn't assume or support only one way of reading/browsing/working.
I have a pet peeve kinda similar to your complaint, too: I hate it when tools have HTML docs (or even just READMEs or usage messages) but no manpage. Other formats often come in handy for me, too, but I want to be able to view the docs where I'm already using the tool, dammit!
In study sessions in school I would sometimes look things up by thinking "it was on the lower left about this far into the book." I remember studies done years ago that showed reading a physical book improved memory and learning due to the geometry and positioning reinforcing the neural paths, and anecdotally that was definitely the case for me. I don't think I'm hallucinating them, this article cites several studies that support that. Anyone who suggests PDFs are just as good "because they have pages" is missing the point - they aren't physical objects, and that matters.
In PDFs you'll have visual memory of the position on the page, but not how many pages into the book you are.
It wouldn't seem hard to add to a PDF reader ...
PDFs have pages, and I usually find that I remember about which page something is on in a PDF I am reffering to as I do when it is printed or in a book. I definitely think there is lots of oppurtunity to improve the UX, but there a a lot of advantages to electronic presentation.
I agree 100% as a fellow engineer.
This is exactly the reason I dislike reflowable formats. Younger people don’t seem to appreciate the benefits of the spatial position of information within a PDF/printed text. As an undergrad, by the time I finished a textbook chapter, I would have both the information and the general spatial layout of the text committed to memory. The latter greatly helped recall and cognitive integration. 30 years later, I can still pick up my undergrad textbook, dimly recall where the information is located, and quickly get back up to speed. The human brain has a powerful spatial ‘muscle memory’ for recalling information. This is lost when dealing with .mobi and .epub formats.
what I'm missing from a physical book is the ability to pipe it through ollama and directly ask questions about where to find the info
I'm doing this with man pages today but as LLMs get better solving this kind of search problem seems like a major application
But none of that mitigates the problem of screen real estate. Maybe I'm just an old but I like to see more of the page.
The Chromebooks, do they have a jack for a second monitor? A good sized monitor could take care of a lot of these problems. Even better would be if they can also put books, pdfs etc. on an iPad for reading.
If I'm going to stay at a particular place for working, I want at least 24" in screen areas. 4K if I'm going to stare at text. An iPad works great if you're reading only or working on the document itself (annotation). Not so great for quick browsing.
And the magic of Ctrl+F, highlights, and comments.
Can you name such an application?
I can fold or flip a page so, that I can quickly view certain parts of the second page while I read the first one.
The original specifications in the GGP:
> switching between X pages before and here, highlighting quickly, making quick notes on the side and so on.
Any PDF reader I've used will do those things, iirc.
> I can fold or flip a page so, that I can quickly view certain parts of the second page while I read the first one.
With PDFs, you can open it in as many windows as you like and arrange them for simultaneous viewing on your screen. Open a copy on another device too if you like.
I'm not saying books have no advantage, just not for those functions IMHO.
can't wait for the javascript error when I try to switch gears on the touchscreen of my future car!
I've never driven a Tesla, but don't they have voice activation? Can't you say "hey Tesla, reduce AC to low"? I totally agree that tactile feedback is superior to tapping a screen, but if it had accurate voice activation that would be almost as good for me (once I got used to the weirdness of talking to the car like Knight Rider)
They have and they are more than accurate enough even if you're not a native speaker.
It's just unwilling to learn/change.
Saw an Audi today which is same physical size and price range to a Tesla model 3. It was down right funny how much useless crap it has on the dashboard, how bad it looks and how claustrophobic it feels compared to model 3.
But why should they be willing to change? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you claiming the users should just meekly accept change for the sake of change, and never complain?
To the great of my then teachers, I used to scribble and write equations on my table while studying. I had paper, but for some reason I just loved doing math directly on the table.
I was told off for it often, but I don't think I would have liked math as much as I did if I didn't have that option.
I recently took a CS101 class that used ZyBooks for the textbook and absolutely hated it for this very reason [1].
The "reading" was basically a bunch of mandatory checkbox exercises that turn into a slog through a bunch of slow-loading prompts that were just "Click Next" to receive confirmation that I had read the info in the prompts.
Absolutely miserable experience all around.
[1] https://www.zybooks.com/
Your old textbooks are probably better too. I remember when I was taking high school chemistry, the then-current textbooks were awful with garish boxes of blocks of colour taking up half the page, font changes, screaming blurbs, etc.
I went to a store and bought the previous older edition of the textbook which was still the same material but without the fad of making everything visually distracting. It is very refreshing to just be able to read a normal flat white page with normal black, blue and red ink.
Yeah. I haven't seen much in the way of modern textbooks but what I have seen tends to be full of garbage. Back when I was in school I couldn't stand used textbooks because they would contain someone else's highlighting and I found that very disruptive. I hate predigested garbage!
We are not alone in that. My wife has some reference books in Chinese that I believe date from the 80s. They are printed on some rather cheap materials. She was trying to find some new ones--and has failed completely. I can't read them, let alone evaluate the usefulness, but she was appalled at what she found and continues to use her taped-together stuff.
Glad to know I am not the only parent who feels this way.
On a personal note, I am one of those people who highlights sections of text books using different coloured markers and scribbled notes on the margins. During my final exam time, my revision of materials was very efficient. I am not sure how to teach my kids these skills.
You can try to teach them to use a good pdf reader. At work there are a lot of Google doc to review. I always convert them to PDF so that I can have private annotations, named bookmarks and highlights of different colors (I can even diff between two versions). This way I am building a collection of PDF I can locally search.
On this topic, computers are great to make flashcards. Instead of the paragrahed notes, when learning material, I am taking note in the form of short Q&A using markdown flashcards. Works great for me. Easy to review efficiently, easy to extend.
This said, I am not sure this is adapted to kids. Hope you share your skills to your kids.
> use a good pdf reader.. markdown flash cards
Ever had the experience that your favorite shoes or watch is discontinued by the manufacturer? It sucks because you’re back on the consumer treadmill again, wasting time and money on things that aren’t as good and struggling with an annoying distraction that previously did not exist while you try to find something that works for you again.
Software churn is just like this, only much worse. It should/could have been different, but it’s not.
So no, I don’t really think we should take away all books, buttons, and knobs that offer a reasonably consistent user experience and replace everything we can with software and tablets. At least not until software learns to behave. Reading is as basic as tying your shoes. Would you really want SV PMs in charge of revolutionizing the shoe-tying experience every quarter, or dropping updates on you that change the place you’ve always stored your shoes?
Exactly.
It was perfectly fine, I loved it. It worked very well.
They took it away, now I have to re-learn how to do it what I already knew with somethibg that I also have to pay for.
Sometimes we should just keep things as they are and stop looking for the next thing.
Relearning is fine if that’s on the way to a new stable state, but I just don’t see that happening. The fact that people are discussing the best pdf reader after like 2+ decades of widespread usage, or the fact that signing a pdf often means rebooting into a different OS or using a cloud service that just wants a look at what kind of stuff you’re signing just totally destroys the idea that this tech is working for us.
Further, does anyone believe that pdfs are going to fix something like textbook costs? You will still pay too much for something that you don’t really own now and cannot share or loan out, etc. Savings for the publisher or distributor cabals are not going to find their way to end users, or if they do then this will certainly be a temporary situation. They already know how much they can charge and get away with it, so…
I’m far from a Luddite, but just know that tech is great to the extent that it gets out of the way and lets us focus on things we care about. Corporate tech is the opposite though, because it always wants engagement, feeding, maintenance. PDFs and chrome books that empty out your backpack might look like a convenience for students but who really benefits? The people that push Chromebooks get a captive audience of tax payers and children who are future android fans, the distributors that can empty their warehouses and fire a forklift driver, etc.
Business as usual.. everyone should think critically about it when someone is telling them “these changes are for your own good”.
What's your good pdf reader of choice? And do you use any software to organize your collection, or just the filesystem?
Not the same person but I would suggest using zotero for this purpose. This is one of the best use case of zotero (try zotero 7 beta). Combined with its iPad app you will find it can tick all your requirements.
Massive +1 to Zotero. And 7 is out of beta now!
I recently went back to school and started using Zotero again. Reading and annotating books and papers on iPad, and then having access to all of my notes when writing on desktop is such a simple but amazing feature.
On Linux, I use zathura (but I rarely annotate my PDFs and I use my iPad for that). On macOS, I used Preview (it was good enough) and PDF Expert (Not the subscription version) for editing pages and outline. On the iPad, I begrudgingly use Documents (by readdle).
My PDF are managed by Calibre, but I export various subsets to the file system, so I can find them easily (on the network).
I highly recommend trying out sioyek (as a zathura replacement). it has a bunch of features that make it even more suitable for consuming technical papers/textbooks - such as a significantly faster search & index, an auto generated table of contents, highlights, and portals.
sioyek. its featureset is specifically focused on digesting textbook/academic articles/technical papers.
I have this problem right since i got my first tab during ny bachelors. Given how expensive books are, I have had temptation to just buy 3-4 10inch kindles and wing it. Also, it's very important that kids use their hands to write even if they don't actually turn in handwritten work. The act of even just doodling while thinking has been shown to be extremely beneficial
Just out of curiosity, have you heard of the Remarkable Paper Pro? I just got one and it's decent at the writing experience. Probably even good. But currently it's basically only for writing, you can export PDF or png to an email or their cloud. You can write on imported pdfs as well.
You'd have to be pretty well off to afford it as a student.
I'd consider just using the campus printer to print whatever material you need. Or borrow the books from the library.
I know; I was fortunate as a student to have a Gateway convertible(yay complicated hinge mechanism) laptop with a 4 year warranty. It was okay with notes (I did really love OneNote but portability of those notes was not good), and right before the end of the warranty period the hinge failed so they replaced it entirely. It was actually more expensive than the rm paper pro and I would relish the opportunity to have it back then. Granted, it was also a full Windows laptop too, which the paper pro is decidedly not.
One of my children is a maths undergrad (UK) and all their texts are on-line too. He's in a minority in that he uses the library and borrows books. Many of his cohort don't.
On one hand, I remember how costly textbooks were and I'm glad he doesn't have that. But I still have some of my student textbooks and its interesting to flip through them and see old margin notes, and consider what has and hasn't changed over thirty years.
Out of curiosity, does the Chromebook have a connector for an external display?
But yes, trying to help someone with anything computer related when they're on a crappy laptop display is... trying.
Anyone here know how it is in the UK? My kid will be starting school soon, and this terrifies me.
There have been reports on the BBC about some schools going completely screen-free, occasionally from parents' pressure. Good luck!
Books are better in book form for one simple reason: Spatiality and tactility. Skimming, skipping pages, marking and jumping between different parts of the book. These actions are all extremely easy, intuitive and convenient with a paper book. There's no replacement for digital books. Using a mouse means you're no longer interacting directly with the medium and even if you do use a touchscreen, digital books aren't designed to be used or interacted with in any sane way.
Paper books have excellent UI, far better than ebooks in most respects. I wish ebooks at least came close to matching them, because the damn things are bulky and heavy.
I've found that printing can help a lot in these situations. While you can't always print everything, math notes and scratch work are still much easier on paper, no digital solution has fully replaced that yet! The article is focused on reading, but I recall previous discussions on the neurological aspects of writing and motor control, where much of our brain is linked to muscle control and dexterity [1].
[1] "Effects of Physical Activity on Motor Skills and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: A Systematic Review" (2017) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2017/2760716
This study [Mangen, Walgermo and Brønnick (2012)] should be replicated with adult subjects and N=500 instead of just N=72 kids from a single class.
In Sweden, based on similar results sub-notebooks and tables that were only recently introduced were removed again. I respect the Swedish for reacting on the new evidence instead of being in denial that the purchase of so much hardware was a mistake.
I write, read, and review scientific papers throughout the year, and most of the time, I will print them out (sometimes over one hundred pages for a single conference - e.g. 10 papers a 10 pages). The clearest benefit is reading mathematical formulae on paper vs screen, from my subjective experience, but also the ability to scribble notes, turn back the page to re-read something to double-check without much effort.
As much as I like computers, paper is the most ingenious medium ever invented by humankind, and the second most durable w.r.t. long-term preservation of the written word (after parchment).
> the ability to scribble notes, turn back the page to re-read something to double-check without much effort.
I agree 100%. The simple act of turning back the page/pages is so fast and efficient. My brain seems to even remember where on the page the info I want is. So much more is visible in a single 'eye-shot'. I don't get that same mental experience with e-docs - not sure why. I did grow up with paper so there is a bias.
I had not thought about the paging-back issue until you mentioned it, but I recognize in myself what you have said about it. Our brains and sensorimotor systems are developed for direct interaction with the physical world, not through proxies (though we can get pretty good with decent proxies through practice.)
On the other hand, being able to search is invaluable, as is the ability to have the footnote pages open in a separate window, if the software does not provide a better option. Finally, I can't imagine a good interface that is not pencil-like for sketching diagrams.
I agree. For novels, digital works well—I have hundreds of books on my Kindle. But recently, while studying a math book, I bought the paperback for exactly the reason you mentioned.
I agree that for the act of learning, the tactility of paper is a huge benefit. But for preserving and recalling notes and highlights, electronic wins. I can have hundreds of books or papers on whichever device I'm on and look up notes and annotations I've made over several years.
I've tried figuring out how to get the best of both worlds, but maybe you really just need to decide which trade-off to go with.
You can come reasonably close by scanning & OCRing your notebooks. (And having numbered pages in your notebooks)
It's not great, but it's improving searchability quite a bit.
To me paper has a huge advantage for skipping around, but in every other context I prefer the screen assuming it's big enough. Things like Kindles and phones are only good for text that works fine reflowed and where you don't need to keep looking back as you read.
The screen would also benefit from something I have never seen used: Have a second window that shows whatever images, graphs etc (pretty much anything that's not just words in a row) are relevant to whatever is currently displayed in the main window.
> paper is the most ingenious medium ever invented by humankind, and the second most durable w.r.t. long-term preservation of the written word (after parchment).
And clay tablets.
As someone who spent 6 years at the uni in the first half of 2000’s having access to the mixture of printed and digital materials, and as someone who has to read tons of different formal and informal docs on a daily basis, I can firmly say I don’t care about the results of this study and at least they are irrelevant to me. You need to get your tasks done, research and learn anything? Use whatever medium is available and fits your needs best and allows you to yield better results in a shorter timespan.
I won’t bother printing some programming language documentation and I miss the ability to search through text in printed books.
That being said, printed books smell good, and I enjoy the typographic excellence of them every time I grab a real book.
In somewhat delicious irony, I find this PDF almost unreadable on my iPhone screen due to the tiny font.
Hah: “The students were randomized into two groups, where the first group read two texts (1400–2000 words) in print, and the other group read the same texts as PDF on a computer screen.”
Maybe they should try the experiment again using a non-hostile format for presenting information on a computer.
(In case anyone else was wondering about resolution, this 2012 study used 15” LCDs at 1280x1024 running Windows XP - so definitely not retina.)
It’s double ironic because it’s not very readable on paper either! The line length is way too long. If it were in HTML you could fix that.
Yup. A piece of paper is too wide for comfortable reading. Two columns works much better.
I believe digital reading could be more benifitial if better media were applied. This 2012 study invited "72 tenth graders read texts as PDF on a computer screen", which is simply bad.
For example, people spent hours exploring wikipedia, this could never be done with physical paper. I often find myself looking for Ctrl+F button holding a book. Interactive textbooks were posted on HN many times, like you can alter a numerical input and see graphs chaning in real time. This helps a lot for kids with limited imagination.
These days I can't live without an AI assistant. While reading, it's just so convenient just to ask. The AI might be wrong from time to time, so keep a critical mind, the AI is immensely helpful for foreign-language materials and complex acedemical papers.
>For example, people spent hours exploring wikipedia, this could never be done with physical paper.
I must not understand what you're saying here. I'm envisioning someone reading an article, seeing a reference to something unfamiliar, then stopping to read another article in a nearby source about that thing or any other random topic, recursing for hours. This is easily done, and often was by children a few decades ago, with any encyclopedia set.
> This is easily done ... with any encyclopedia set
I get your point, the problem is that, a good set of encyclopedia is NOT available to every household everytime, it takes lots of space and storage. You can't go to a park with a set of encyclopedia, on the other hand, an iPad with offline wikipedia, navigating by clicking links is much, much easier than stacking many, many opened books on your fixed desk.
Plausible result, but considering that this HN post is appearing on the same day as one of the top posts is about scientific fraud… let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I say it all the time: provocative experimental results should be considered fraudulent until the raw data is shared, and then spurious until replicated.
I would put this only slightly differently: experimental results should be considered unpublishable without the raw data, and irrelevant until replicated.
I can read something on screen ten times and not have it make any impression. Paper is much better for me personally.
Maybe somewhat related but I also find that if I'm taking notes, I retain things much better if I handwrite them. Often I don't even need to refer to my handwritten notes because I can remember them, which is almost never the case with typed notes.
And interestingly, it's specifically handwritten notes in pen. When I use a pencil it's much more like just typing them out.
Me too. I do a lot of text editing on a daily basis and I find I gain at least +10 IQ points when I print out the text and review on paper.
My colleague swears by her iPad, but I always go the paper route.
Yes, this is me as well. Reading on paper is so much easier and faster for me, and my reading comprehension is substantially higher as compared to reading on a screen. Even an e-paper screen.
I had long thought that this is because I'm old enough that for a huge portion of my life, most of my reading was on paper and people a generation or two younger than my wouldn't see the same disparity. This paper, however, seems to indicate that this may not be the whole story.
I find reading texts on a 13 inch (3200x1800, 276 ppi) laptop easier to remember than on a 42 inch (3840x2160, 104 ppi) monitor. Reading takes more effort as text isn't as clear on the big screen.
Been waiting for 42 inch 8k monitors since 2017. There's a 55 inch IPS on the horizon (ASRock PG558KF).
Does anyone have experience reading text on 8K VA panels like Samsung QN700B?
I think there comes a point where a monitor is too big, at least if it's not curved. But a 276ppi monitor would bother me--nice for the text, but controls don't seamlessly adjust for ppi and typically do not adjust at all.
This machine has one 27" monitor that I frequently use for games, video etc, but that's pretty much all I use it for, rarely do I do text based things on it.
27 inch 4K screen is a reasonable compromise, I find (163 ppi). Display scaling is a must, but same on laptop display. I guess a larger screen is like having more pages on your desk at once.
I feel like I've known this intuitively for years, but have never been able to properly explain it to others.
For example, when I was in university (2015-20), all my lecture notes were available as pdfs, but I would just always print them anyway while the other students would read them on their devices. And when I learned French, I only bought physical books and never even once tried an e-reader. Paper is just easier to understand!
The big question is, e-ink screens, how are they?
Search the study for "ink," this is discussed briefly. They produce less visual fatigue than regular screens because they reflect ambient light rather than relying entirely on being backlit.
In terms of comprehension the hierarchy probably goes paper > e-ink > all other screens. Hard to quantify the gap between each.
I think this is a big point to consider: we've known for a long time that taking notes increases recall to a degree that likely dwarfs this screen vs paper thing. There are studies where it's like a 7-8x improvement in recall which is tied to comprehension.
So if you want to actually remember and learn from stuff, definitely take notes. Preferably handwritten ones. Preferably do it all on paper. But the key is really to just be taking notes.
Lastly there is also the argument that doing anything is better than nothing. Some people aren't going to get through any books at all if they're not audiobooks, so, they should keep on listening to audiobooks, even if comprehension or recall might not be as good that way. Personally I've been on a hardcover books kick recently, I've found I just get a lot of satisfaction out of reading a proper, high quality hardcover book from start to finish, alone or with a loved one, preferably with a cup of tea, so that's what I'm now doing.
> we've known for a long time that taking notes increases recall to a degree that likely dwarfs this screen vs paper thing
Bit of anecdata that agrees with you here - a few years back I bought a decent colour e-ink android tablet (Onyx Boox). My intent was that I was going to totally use it for reading through journal papers without needing to print them out, regular ebook reading, etc etc.
The VAST MAJORITY of what I have used it for, to date, is the note taking app. Like, not notes scribbled over whatever I'm reading.. just notes.
The act of doodling notes in meetings and training and classes and when problem-solving definitely aids my [lack of] working memory and I definitely see how making notes improves comprehension.
I bought a book replacement and it became a notepad replacement :)
I too have found myself preferring a good solid actual book when it comes to reading, too. Ebooks just miss something tactile. I suppose that highlights when reading becomes an activity with intent, as opposed to something you feel you have to do.
My own personal experience is I hate reading any long form material on a computer or tablet screen. Something about the experience was both painful and didn’t seem to work with how I read. I bought a used e-reader on a lark at a flea market to try it out and picked up reading as a hobby again. Even with the newer backlit e-readers the experience is much different.
As a first guess I would say:
* “Paper like” looks, including slightly blurred text (since e-ink pixels aren’t square)
* Mostly reflective lighting and softer lighting when backlit
* Dedicated and simple UI
* Perhaps most importantly singly consumable, individual and discrete chunks of readable text
Are all factors in making this a better experience. E-pubs that can reflow their text and so that each “page” is rendered legibly and in full are great experiences. Reading fixed format PDFs is better than on a tablet but not as good as an epub
Have you tried using redshift?
I have, and still find normal computer screens to just not work for reading long form content for me, even reading an epub in an epub app on a normal computer screen/tablet still feels off
Might be refresh rate, have you tried a faster monitor/screen?
I know some people despise 60Hz screens because they're too slow and they notice the flickering.
Very curious as well - I use Supernote A5X for PDFs and sometimes I reach to the edge of the screen to try to turn a page
My hypothesis is that the PDF format bears much blame here. The results might be very different if the material is in a reflowable format like an epub or a web page. If you think about it, the notion of a page exists only because of the physical limitations of the paper medium, and PDF is page-centric only because it was designed to represent printable materials. There's no reason to stick to pages anymore if the material is to be consumed on a screen, and PDF is therefore also the wrong choice for this.
There's a bit of irony in reading a text about printed vs. digital text in a digital text.
My comprehension of it was very low.
Nobody's stopping me from printing it
I've been reading digital image processing by Gonzalez and I must be honest: the sheer thickness of the book makes it very hard to handle (especially lying in bed). As others pointed out already, I do miss the ability of search the text. Good book though
The index is how you’re meant to search a paper book.
I'm a book person through and through. Crafting Interpreters is an example of how a textbook can be when someone really puts the effort in, I know there's also a free PDF version but the paper book is well worth the price.
E-readers like the remarkable are getting closer, but that one's banned by some of our clients until they hire someone who understands security.
I would love to know what happens with e-ink devices then. I feel this test is doing many things at once and the conclusion may not carry to e-ink (it's easier in the eyes, you can scribble...)
Maybe add “2012” to the title as that is when the study was done.
Here's a more recent meta analysis: Delgado et al., 2018. Don't throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X18300...
"Paper-based reading yields better comprehension outcomes than digital-based reading."
I definitely prefer being able to scroll with trackpad and keyboard vs physical pages.
I wonder if any followup studies have been done on this.
[2012]
N=72
This is blasphemous
The answer, as is with everything, was N=42
:-)
My kids’ tomes don’t even have vellum! They use paper! Next they’ll be printing them with moveable type instead of illuminating them.
Kids today!
I mostly stopped reading paper books, as I do almost all book reading through Libby app on my tablet that has a high resolution display like most tablets produced in the past few years. It's a superior experience than a paper book in almost every way.
At work and home, with 4k monitor, it's so much easier to put multiple reading materials side by side and read / research across.
In 2012, even on the state of the art computer systems, the reading experience wasn't as good as it is now.
(2012)
What about eink
A typical textbook gives me around an 11x17 display area with better than retina resolution and a refresh limited only by the speed of my optic nerve.
That’s about the usable area of a 27” monitor after all the UI trash has taken its share of space.
And of course, it leaves my monitor free for practicing whatever it is I’m trying to learn from the book. Alt tabbing is a terrible experience comparatively. Glancing at the text takes the time of a saccade and uses visual memory, leaving my short term memory free for concepts and working memory.
Obviously get a good book holder that you can stand next to your monitor(s).
I've only read the abstract. One thing I would like to read about is, if the phenomenon is real what's the mechanism for it. Is it that people on screen have the tendency to change tab to look at memes every other paragraph? Is it that they associate screens with entertainment, and even without acting on it the brain gets too lazy? Or what?
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