Even as more and more e-readers are poured into the market everyday and people thronging stores to grab their own copy of the e-reader printed books still have a new study to uphold their relevance. It the fast paced world people prefer technology over the usual mundane things that have persisted since very log time but a new study points to the error in everyone’s perspective at least in the preference given to e-books by the users over the printed books.
According to a recent study the reader face more problems and have less reading speed when reading a book on an e-reader like kindle or iPad as compared to the printed book. Dr. Jacob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group which is a product consultant company conducted the tests with 24 people. He tested three different e-book methods that are currently very popular with the e-reader of the times the PC, the Kindle 2, and the iPad. He made them read a short story by Ernest Hemigway on these devices and then they were made to read the same story from a printed book. The resulting time taken by the 24 participants in reading the story from the various media were them compared.
To everyone’s amusements the results revealed that the reading on the e-reader took about 10.7 times more time than the conventional printed books. But even though the speeds are quite slow people preferred to read books on a tablet. And of all the devices reading from the pc monitor was disliked the most by the test subjects.
The ipad performed a little better than the kindle at only 6.7 percent slower as compared to kindle at 10.7 percent. But the researchers dismissed this difference as negligible. Along with this the readers were asked to rate their reading experience while reading from the various media. On a scale of 1 to 7 both the ipad and kindle stood at nearly the same ratings of 5.8 and 5.7 respectively but the pc monitor lacked far behind at mere 3.6 points.
But the e-readers need not loose heart, because at first there seems to be many loop-holes in the manner the study was conducted that leaves a very large scope for errors to creep in. Firstly, the participants were selected randomly and their in no logic behind their selection and they do not represent the public at large. Secondly only a small number of e-readers were considered for the study.
But the preference given to the e-reader to the electronic media of reading over the print media strongly suggests that the e-readers are here to stay in the markets and for a very long time.