Future of the Book

Goethe’s “Werther” in 140 characters? A whole library on smartphone? The digitalization of texts has changed not only our access to literature, but also our reading habits. Especially for children and young people hard to reach as readers, it has made reading more attractive.

“Werther was glad he was gone. Then the great suffering began and continued until he shot himself.” This is one of the winning tweets of the Twitter Literature Competition at welttwitteratur.de, in which the user FrederickGlieb sums up Goethe’s storm and stress novel in the manner of the bestseller Twitteratur. Weltliteratur in 140 Zeichen (Twitter Literature. World Literature in 140 Characters) by Emmett Rensin and Alexander Aciman. If so-called “Twitterature” has now and again come up against criticism by lovers of literature, it is nevertheless a conspicuous trend: readers want to have the most important content concisely summarized rather than read a book from cover to cover. Only 46 per cent still do the latter, as Reading in Germany, a large-scale study conducted by the Reading Foundation in 2008, notes. The same figure also manifests itself in current research by the Reading Foundation. Timo Reuter, a researcher at the Institute for Reading and Media at the Foundation, reports that a trend is emerging for reading as nibbling and that reading is more and more taking on a hyperlink structure.

Reading habits have changed

In this way reading habits are increasingly adapting to the changing conditions in which texts are grasped. In the new media, texts are more and more read on a screen or display. Especially the Internet, with its bewildering mass of text material poses, new challenges to reading: in the search for relevant information, users often scroll a text, skim it or read it only in snatches. Links lead him to other texts and so sometimes on completely wrong paths, so that there is the danger of getting lost in the forest of texts. Frequently a user opens texts in several tabs and reads them in parallel. Last but not least, new text formats such as Twitterature, mobile phone novels and literature blogs demand the development of new reading techniques and are at the same time perfectly adapted to them.

Digital reading – a danger to understanding texts?

So far there have been few studies on the impact of changing reading habits on the understanding of texts. In one study, carried out by the IT consulting company Miratech, readers that read a newspaper article in print could reproduce 90 per cent of its content, whereas those that read the text on an iPad retained only 70 per cent of the content.

Is therefore digital reading superficial? The special study Reading in the Electronic Age, conducted as part of the 2009 PISA Study, investigated this among other questions. It compared the understanding of electronic texts with that of printed ones. There were significant differences. In seven of the nineteen participating countries, school children performed clearly worse in the reading of electronic media than of printed media. In seven other countries, mainly countries with high overall reading skills, school children performed considerably better in reading digital media than in reading printed texts. On the whole, trained reading skills facilitated the understanding of texts independently of their format. The deficits of those with weak reading skills are even more pronounced in reading digital texts than in reading printed texts.

The potential of digital reading

Yet especially digital reading harbors the potential of leading children and young people who are hard to reach as readers to reading. Early findings of the still unpublished study The Potential of E-Readers in the Promotion of Reading by the Reading Foundation show that the threshold to (first) contact with literature is significantly lowered by digital reading. E-books stir up an initial enthusiasm and give the book a “cool” modern image. Moreover, children and teenagers more frequently choose extensive texts when they can download them than they do when they have to borrow or buy these in printed form. This, explains Timo Reuter, is because the appearance of a book cover on the Internet does away with the intimidating sight of a thick tome on a shelf.

To exploit this advantage, however, e-books must fulfill certain conditions. The text should be capable of being directly downloaded from the Internet onto an intuitively useable reading device. MFPs also offer the possibility of incorporating playful and interactive elements, which in turn can increase the attractiveness of reading. Finally, a decisive factor in maintaining the initial enthusiasm is a wide range of mangas, comic books, young people’s magazines and their appealing design. Here not only the graphic representation of content but also the required technology constitute major challenges for many authors and publishers.

Reading skills equal media literacy

With the increase of digitally read texts, it is particularly important to raise reading skills so as to ensure the effective use and understanding of this material. Not least because the new media have led overall to our reading more, it is important we be trained in the “core skills of the twenty-first century”. In future, reading as a form of understanding the world will take place in a variety of formats and information channels; only good reading skills can give us the ability to find our way through the increasingly dense media jungle.