Las tablets crecieron a costa de las PC

Tablets To Grow 53.4% This Year, Says Gartner, As The Traditional PC declines 11.2% [Updated]

by Natasha Lomas (@riptari)

The tablet category is continuing to eat the PC’s lunch, albeit it’s a large lunch so the feast is taking a while. Analyst Gartner expects worldwide tablet shipments to grow 42.7% 53.4% [Gartner has issued a correction to its earlier figures] this year, with shipments reaching 184 million units. And while traditional PCs are still shipping a lot more units (303,100 forecast for this year), those shipments are continuing to decline — predicted to be down 11.2% on 2012 shipments.

That’s lower even than Gartner’s prior forecast, back in April, when it said it expected PCs to decline 7.3% this year.

Growth in the so-called ultramobile category — aka lightweight laptops and portables running a full desktop OS such as Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet – is offsetting the traditional PC decline somewhat. But even adding in that category, overall PCs plus ultramobiles are forecast to decline 8.4% this year. Gartner previously said it expects tablets to be outshipping desktop computers and ultramobiles combined by 2017.

By 2014, it now expects the gap between traditional PCs and tablet shipments to have narrowed to just over 18,000 more PCs than tablets shipped, although it expects ultramobiles to have grown to close to 40,000 units shipped by then (up from around 18,600 this year).

Growth in the ultramobile category will be down to serving users that need to “balance work and play” considerations in a single device, said Gartner — thereby allowing hybrid ultramobiles to step in and offer the functionality of a PC in the form factor of a tablet.

Turning to tablets proper, smaller and cheaper is the order of the day — with consumers’ preference for the 7-inch form factor causing continued price decline in premium tablets. The raft of cheaper priced tablet hardware — from the likes of Amazon with its Kindle Fire line and Google with its Nexus-branded slates — is clearly helping to underpin overall tablet growth, taking share away from Apple’s more expensive iPad line.

Smaller tablets are also going to put a dent in the smartphone’s holiday appeal, according to Gartner. ”Continuing on the trend we saw last year, we expect this holiday season to be all about smaller tablets as even the long-term holiday favourite — the smartphone — loses its appeal,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement.

More generally, while the mobile phone market is expected to continue to experience steady growth, Gartner is calling time on the “opportunity for high average selling price (ASP) smartphones”. It expects growth in the mobile segment to be powered by mid-tier smartphones in mature markets, and low-end Android smartphones in emerging markets. So again, cheap devices are winning out. The wider point there is that many developed markets are saturated — pushing smartphone growth to emerging countries where lower ASP devices are required.

Gartner’s forecast for worldwide device shipments by operating system this year and next (rounded up percentage marketshares below) shows Android continuing to build out its empire — helped by growth in cheaper tablets and smartphones. Android will be approaching a half-market share across all the device types by 2014, while Windows/Windows Phone and iOS/Mac OS manage only marginal growth:

2013

• Android 38%
• Windows 14%
• iOS/Mac OS 12%
• RIM 1 %
• Others 35%

2014

• Android 45%
• Windows 15%
• iOS/Mac OS 14%
• RIM 0.8%
• Others 26%

On the wearables front, Gartner expects the market opportunity to remain primarily about companion devices that are used in conjunction with mobile phones, rather than replacing them. Gartner predicts that less than 1% of consumers will replace their mobile phones with a combination of a wearable device and a tablet by 2017.

“In the short term, we expect consumers to look at wearables as nice to have rather than a ‘must have’, leaving smartphones to play the role of our faithful companion throughout the day,” added Milanesi. ”For wearables to be successful, they need to add to the user experience by complementing and enhancing what other devices already offer. They also need to be stylish yet practical, and most of all hit the right price.”

TechCrunch

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Tablet norcoreana sorprende

On North Korea’s surprisingly amazing tablet you can play Angry Birds and read Dickens

By Lily Kuo

The Samjiyon tablet isn't likely to be sold out. AP Photo/Vincent Yu

“After a few days of intensive use I can say that this is one of the few cases in my career as a consumer when I got more for my money than I had expected.” Rüdiger Frank, a professor at the University of Vienna and frequent visitor to North Korea, bought a Samjiyon SA-70, the only tablet made in North Korea, at a shop in Pyongyang last month, for €180 (about $240). He has now posted a lengthy review of the device, named after the location of a Korean-Japanese battle in 1939. And he has some remarkably nice things to say about it.

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When we learned just over a year ago that North Korea had developed a tablet that runs on Google’s popular Android operating system, we didn’t take the device too seriously. (For one, you can’t get online with it.) But Frank found 488 pre-installed applications like Angry Birds, a Siri-esque speech-recognition program, and a library that includes foreign books like Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, Gone with the Wind, and Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet.

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Frank said he bought the Samjiyon for €180 (about $240) in Pyongyang.38north.org

The tablet also included a Microsoft Office package, with Word, Excel and PowerPoint. According to Frank, the weakest feature of the device—which came with with 4 GB  of memory and a 1-GHz processor—was that its seven-inch screen has a resolution of only 800 by 480 pixels. Google’s Nexus 7, the same size, has 1920 by 1200 pixels.

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The tablet’s landing page.38north.org

Frank’s account matches that of a tourist to Pyongyang who bought another version of the Samjiyon for about $200 earlier this year. The tourist, who gave his name only as Michael, said using the device to play games, take photos, or open different apps was a fairly fluid experience. “In terms of responsiveness and speed, it can almost compete against the leading tablets,” he told IDG News in July.

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The tablet shouldn’t be taken as a sign that life has gotten dramatically better for millions of poor North Koreans. Only a small minority can afford it, mostly elite officials and others profiting from an emerging underground economy that’s allowing them to buy mobile phones or refrigerators.

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The Samjiyon, however, is a window into the country’s development and political priorities. Frank recommends studying things like the pre-installed dictionaries and books, many of them about Kim Il Sung, for clues about the socialist country’s evolving ideology. An “IT dictionary” could demonstrate the country’s focus in terms of technology—or how far behind it is. The dictionary includes an entry for  “Anna Kournikova”—a computer virus, not the tennis player, from 12 years ago. And it includes mentions of Apple and Yahoo, but not Google.

Quartz

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La revolución de las tablets indias

India’s tablet revolution will change the world sooner than you think
By Vivek Wadhwa
Vivek Wadhwa is the vice president of innovation and research at Singularity University, and fellow at Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University.

Just a swipe away from a revolution. Reuters/Parivartan Sharma

This originally appeared on LinkedIn. You can follow Vivek Wadhwa here. 

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I wrote this article for Times of India. It is India-focused, but the same lessons apply everywhere. Cheap tablets, connectivity, and social media have already fomented revolutions in Middle East. They are causing China to have a harder time controlling its restive population and allowing the world’s children to rise above the fears and biases of their parents. They will open up new technology possibilities and shake up industries—even in the developed world. Wait and see how innovation from the East soon reaches the West.

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Watching the news from India, one could easily conclude that the country has become more corrupt and its men have become more violent. Sadly, corruption and abuse of women aren’t new to India. Corruption is a legacy of the British Raj. Women all over the world are abused. What has changed is the ability of India’s normally docile middle-class and its youth to speak up and demand change. That is what technology has made possible.

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The technologies that allowed people to shame the government were cell phones, TV and social media. There is much more to come.

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As the poor gain access to the internet through smartphones and tablets and the middle-class gets better connectivity, the country will witness nothing less than a revolution in commerce, education and social values.

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Imagine villagers recording videos of bribe takers and uploading these to sites such as Ipaidabribe.com and documenting the abuses they suffer at the hands of the police. Or students recording the attendance of teachers—who don’t show up for work—on public websites. Or direct payments of subsidies and social benefits to the poor via PayPal-style banking accounts, thereby cutting out corrupt government officials.

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All of this is going to become possible within the next two to three years as the cost of tablet computers drops to the Rs 1,500 ($25) level and internet access becomes cheaper and more widely available. (In India, cell and mobile data plans cost less than 1/10 as in the US—they are affordable by the masses.)

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The Indian government inadvertently triggered this tablet computing revolution by sanctioning the Aakash tablet. It only ordered 100,000 units and spent less than it would have on a junket of ministers going abroad. But this project got so much attention that it ended up lowering the expected base price of tablet technologies from the $400-$500 that is common in the West to $35-$50. This would not have happened on its own. Note the price of the Apple iPhone 5S. The cheapest models cost over $500 without a contract.

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The Aakash tablet has been mired in Indian politics but is achieving big success in its new incarnations. The manufacturer, Datawind, has become a leading tablet supplier in India and abroad. These have also been tested in American schools by disadvantaged communities and were proved to be viable. Americans can’t wait for these tablets to become available to them.

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The uses of tablet technology will go far beyond giving the poor a voice. As India gets connected by fiber optic cable and mobile carriers expand data coverage, cheap tablets will find thousands of new uses.

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To start with, these will trigger an e-commerce revolution that will make the US dotcom boom look lame. Companies such as GoVasool.com will become India’s Amazon.com and there will be many of them. Apps such as LocalCircles.com will connect neighborhoods and communities all over India, providing them with a way of solving common problems.

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There will be a revolution in education as courseware from all over the world becomes available to the poorest of the poor, new apps are developed that teach specific skills, and children all over India start connecting—and learning—from each other. Technology will make it possible for any poor child to gain the same knowledge as the privileged anywhere in India and across the world.

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There will also be rapid changes in the media and entertainment industries as tablet devices become ubiquitous. Note how the media industry has changed in the US—from print to online. The same will likely happen in India.

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Cheap tablets connected to cheap sensors also open up opportunities to revolutionize health care and farming. And there will be apps for practically every task that requires the management of information. Imagine the neighborhood fruit-seller emailing his customers photographs of his produce and accepting orders over the internet. Or booking rickshaws via apps like the US-based Uber which does taxi rides. I won’t be surprised if the poor figure out better uses of the technology than the rich do.

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All of this seems like wishful thinking, but note how mobile phone usage grew exponentially in India— going from zero to 900 million devices within a decade. Tablets and internet usage will grow even faster and will have an even greater impact.

Quartz

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El iPad más caro del mundo se vende vergonzosamente en Argentina

Here's How Much An iPad Costs In 46 Countries
LIZ TAY, BUSINESS INSIDER AUSTRALIA SEP. 23, 2013, 11:49 AM 11,617 1
Business Insider

Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin

Australia has become the 4th cheapest country in which to buy a 16GB iPad with a retina display, according to CommSec economists Craig James and Savanth Sebastian.

CommSec’s latest iPad index, released today, compares the price of an iPad in 46 countries to track the impact of currency changes on consumer spending, globalisation and retailer margins.

Chief economist James suggested today that the result could imply that the AUD was now fairly valued.

In Australia, Apple’s latest wifi-only 16GB iPad with retina display now costs $A539 ($US506.66): the fourth cheapest in the world at the current exchange rate of $US0.94.

The same device costs $US499 in the US, excluding tax.

Based on late-September 2013 exchange rates and pricing, CommSec deemed Malaysia ($US473.77), Hong Kong ($US501.52), and Japan ($US501.56) the cheapest countries in which to buy an iPad.

The CommSec series began in 2007 as a variant of The Economist’s Big Mac index. James explained last year that both work on the theory that “the same good should trade at broadly the same price across the globe if exchange rates are adjusting properly”.

Australia was the third cheapest of 10 countries in which to buy an iPad in 2010, but ranked 15th on CommSec’s iPad index last year, when the AUD was worth $US1.05. At the time, CommSec concluded the AUD was “around 5% over-valued against the greenback”.

CommSec today described last year’s result as an abnormality:

Since we began the CommSec iPod index in January 2007, Australia has always been one of the cheapest places in the globe to buy an iPad nano media player. In fact, Australia was the cheapest place to buy the popular media player in both October 2008 and December 2009.

Changes in Australia’s relative position reflect the appreciation of the Australian dollar as well as local pricing by Apple

[...]

Online shopping sites and the power of travel are putting pressure on Australia retailers to remain competitive. If local pricing isn’t responsive to exchange rate changes then Aussie shoppers will increasingly look overseas to purchase imported items.

Here are the rankings from CommSec’s report today:

Commsec

This post originally appeared at Business Insider Australia. Copyright 2013.

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Windows: A todo monopolio le llega su cambio tecnológico

In Case You Don't Appreciate How Fast The 'Windows Monopoly' Is Getting Destroyed...

HENRY BLODGET

Business Insider

Bill Gates' infamous video-taped
testimony in the Microsoft anti-trust trial.

In the late 1990s, a single technology company became so unfathomably rich and powerful--and so hellbent on dominating not just its own industry but a massive and rapidly growing new one--that the U.S. government dragged the company into court and threatened to break it up over anti-trust violations.

The case was settled, and the company, Microsoft, agreed to play nicer.

But it turned out that the world had nothing to worry about. As often happens in the technology industry, what has really destroyed Microsoft's choke hold on the global personal computing market over the past 15 years hasn't been a legal threat but a market shift.

Just when it looked like Microsoft's vision of the PC as the center of the tech world would lead to the creation of the world's first trillion-dollar company, the Internet came along.

And it washed over the PC industry like a tidal wave swallowing a pond.

In terms of market value, Microsoft's loss of power has long been visible: The stock is still trading at about half the level it hit at the peak of the tech boom 13 years ago. The effects on the actual PC industry fundamentals have taken longer to develop, but they are also now crystal clear.

Microsoft's "Windows monopoly" hasn't been so much destroyed as rendered irrelevant. Thanks to the explosion of Internet-based cloud computing and smartphones, tablets, and other mobile gadgets, the once all-powerful platform of the desktop operating system has now been reduced to little more than a device driver. As long as your gadget can connect to the Internet and run some apps, it doesn't matter what operating system you use.

Three charts really bring home the challenges that Microsoft and other PC-powered giants like Intel, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard face in adapting to this new Internet-driven world.

First, look at global device shipments. For the two decades through 2005, the personal computer was the only game in town, selling about 200 million units a year. But then smartphones and tablets came along. And now they dwarf the PC market.

BII

This shift in personal computing device adoption, meanwhile, has radically diminished the power of the Windows operating system platform. As recently as three years ago, Microsoft's Windows was still totally dominant--the platform that ran 70% of personal computing devices.

Now, thanks to the rise of Google's Android and Apple's iOS, Windows' global share has been cut in half, to about 30%. More remarkably, Android is now a bigger platform than Windows.

BII

Lastly, and most recently, this chart from analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco illustrates that the PC business is no longer just getting dwarfed by the explosion of smartphone and tablet sales... It has now actually begun to shrink.

Now that people have a choice of devices, it turns out that a full-blown personal computer is often not the most cost-effective, convenient, or simplest way to do what a user wants to do. Instead of being the center of the personal computing world, in other words, the PC is becoming a specialized office-productivity device.

Horace Dediu, Asymco

The news for Microsoft is not all bad. The company has been quite successful at moving from a "unit-driven" sales model to a licensing model, in which companies pay a fee per user per year rather than buying a perpetual license with each new computer. And Microsoft's Office franchise is still extraordinarily profitable and dominant, in part because Google, Apple, and other more Internet-centric companies have made so little investment in their competitive products.

But only 15 years after the government went after Microsoft for anti-trust violations, the idea that the company ever had a "monopoly" on anything is hard to to even understand. And the outlook for Windows, and the traditional PC business in general, seems sure to get even worse going forward.

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Pantalla es igual a papel

El tiempo de lectura de noticias en tabletas es ya igual al de periódicos impresos

Tabinnovation

El tiempo dedicado a la lectura de noticias en periódicos impresos y en tabletas es el mismo. Por primera vez, en países como Alemania, Francia o Estados Unidos el porcentaje de público que lee información de actualidad en papel es igual al que consume estas noticias en sus tablets.

Estos son los datos arrojados por el último informe World Press Trends, una de las fuentes más importantes en la medición del mercado de los periódicos en todo el mundo. Este documento, además, indica que si bien la circulación de periódicos ha caído casi un 1% durante 2012, más de la mitad de la población adulta mundial lee diariamente el periódico. De ellos, 2.500 millones lo hacen de forma impresa, mientras que 600 millones accede a ellos a través de dispositivos digitales.

Por su parte, la inversión publicitaria ha decrecido un 2% en todo el mundo durante el año pasado, lo que supone una caída del 22% desde 2008. En lo que respecta a la publicidad impresa, en los últimos cinco años, Europa Occidental ha sufrido un descenso del 23.3% de la inversión, frente al 42% de Estados Unidos. Este es uno de los motivos por los que muchos medios han decidido cobrar por el visionado de sus contenidos incluso en las versiones digitales de sus publicaciones.

El informe indica que “el mayor reto para los medios de comunicación aún es encontrar la forma de aumentar la fidelización de las audiencias en plataformas digitales”, lo que se debe a que el consumo de periódicos digitales es todavía ínfimo en comparación con el consumo total de contenido a través de Internet.

Fuente imagen: Nasa Goddard Photo and Video

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Papel y pantalla digital: No tan perfectamente sustitutos

The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens

E-readers and tablets are becoming more popular as such technologies improve, but research suggests that reading on paper still boasts unique advantages

By Ferris Jabr

In a viral YouTube video from October 2011 a one-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad's touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they too were screens. When nothing happens, she pushes against her leg, confirming that her finger works just fine—or so a title card would have us believe.

The girl's father, Jean-Louis Constanza, presents "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" as naturalistic observation—a Jane Goodall among the chimps moment—that reveals a generational transition. "Technology codes our minds," he writes in the video's description. "Magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives"—that is, for people who have been interacting with digital technologies from a very early age.

Perhaps his daughter really did expect the paper magazines to respond the same way an iPad would. Or maybe she had no expectations at all—maybe she just wanted to touch the magazines. Babies touch everything. Young children who have never seen a tablet like the iPad or an e-reader like the Kindle will still reach out and run their fingers across the pages of a paper book; they will jab at an illustration they like; heck, they will even taste the corner of a book. Today's so-called digital natives still interact with a mix of paper magazines and books, as well as tablets, smartphones and e-readers; using one kind of technology does not preclude them from understanding another.

Nevertheless, the video brings into focus an important question: How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read? How reading on screens differs from reading on paper is relevant not just to the youngest among us, but to just about everyone who reads—to anyone who routinely switches between working long hours in front of a computer at the office and leisurely reading paper magazines and books at home; to people who have embraced e-readers for their convenience and portability, but admit that for some reason they still prefer reading on paper; and to those who have already vowed to forgo tree pulp entirely. As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading—but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity of such concerns paper-thin?

Since at least the 1980s researchers in many different fields—including psychology, computer engineering, and library and information science—have investigated such questions in more than one hundred published studies. The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common. In the U.S., e-books currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of all trade book sales.

Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

"There is physicality in reading," says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, "maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms, but know when to use the new."

Navigating textual landscapes
Understanding how reading on paper is different from reading on screens requires some explanation of how the brain interprets written language. We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the abstract—with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs. As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially regards letters as physical objects because it does not really have another way of understanding them. As Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid, we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision.

Some of these repurposed brain regions are specialized for object recognition—they are networks of neurons that help us instantly distinguish an apple from an orange, for example, yet classify both as fruit. Just as we learn that certain features—roundness, a twiggy stem, smooth skin—characterize an apple, we learn to recognize each letter by its particular arrangement of lines, curves and hollow spaces. Some of the earliest forms of writing, such as Sumerian cuneiform, began as characters shaped like the objects they represented—a person's head, an ear of barley, a fish. Some researchers see traces of these origins in modern alphabets: C as crescent moon, S as snake. Especially intricate characters—such as Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji—activate motor regions in the brain involved in forming those characters on paper: The brain literally goes through the motions of writing when reading, even if the hands are empty. Researchers recently discovered that the same thing happens in a milder way when some people read cursive.

Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they arelikely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.

In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there's a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text.

In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds. A reader of digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text. As an analogy, imagine if Google Maps allowed people to navigate street by individual street, as well as to teleport to any specific address, but prevented them from zooming out to see a neighborhood, state or country. Although e-readers like the Kindle and tablets like the iPad re-create pagination—sometimes complete with page numbers, headers and illustrations—the screen only displays a single virtual page: it is there and then it is gone. Instead of hiking the trail yourself, the trees, rocks and moss move past you in flashes with no trace of what came before and no way to see what lies ahead.

"The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized," says Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office. "Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book."

At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension. In a study published in January 2013 Anne Mangen of the University of Stavanger in Norway and her colleagues asked 72 10th-grade students of similar reading ability to study one narrative and one expository text, each about 1,500 words in length. Half the students read the texts on paper and half read them in pdf files on computers with 15-inch liquid-crystal display (LCD) monitors. Afterward, students completed reading-comprehension tests consisting of multiple-choice and short-answer questions, during which they had access to the texts. Students who read the texts on computers performed a little worse than students who read on paper.

Based on observations during the study, Mangen thinks that students reading pdf files had a more difficult time finding particular information when referencing the texts. Volunteers on computers could only scroll or click through the pdfs one section at a time, whereas students reading on paper could hold the text in its entirety in their hands and quickly switch between different pages. Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.

Supporting this research, surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control.People report that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier, for example, or quickly scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to have as much control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper however they choose.

Because of these preferences—and because getting away from multipurpose screens improves concentration—people consistently say that when they really want to dive into a text, they read it on paper. In a 2011 survey of graduate students at National Taiwan University, the majority reported browsing a few paragraphs online before printing out the whole text for more in-depth reading. A 2008 survey of millennials (people born between 1980 and the early 2000s) at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island concluded that, "when it comes to reading a book, even they prefer good, old-fashioned print". And in a 2003 study conducted at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, nearly 80 percent of 687 surveyed students preferred to read text on paper as opposed to on a screen in order to "understand it with clarity".

Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences typically associated with reading—especially tactile experiences—matter to people more than one might assume. Text on a computer, an e-reader and—somewhat ironically—on any touch-screen device is far more intangible than text on paper. Whereas a paper book is made from pages of printed letters fixed in a particular arrangement, the text that appears on a screen is not part of the device's hardware—it is an ephemeral image. When reading a paper book, one can feel the paper and ink and smooth or fold a page with one's fingers; the pages make a distinctive sound when turned; and underlining or highlighting a sentence with ink permanently alters the paper's chemistry. So far, digital texts have not satisfyingly replicated this kind of tactility (although some companies are innovating, at least with keyboards).

Paper books also have an immediately discernible size, shape and weight. We might refer to a hardcover edition of War and Peace as a hefty tome or a paperback Heart of Darkness as a slim volume. In contrast, although a digital text has a length—which is sometimes represented with a scroll or progress bar—it has no obvious shape or thickness. An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough "haptic dissonance" to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books.

Exhaustive reading
Although many old and recent studies conclude that people understand what they read on paper more thoroughly than what they read on screens, the differences are often small. Some experiments, however, suggest that researchers should look not just at immediate reading comprehension, but also at long-term memory. In a 2003 study Kate Garland of the University of Leicester and her colleagues asked 50 British college students to read study material from an introductory economics course either on a computer monitor or in a spiral-bound booklet. After 20 minutes of reading Garland and her colleagues quizzed the students with multiple-choice questions. Students scored equally well regardless of the medium, but differed in how they remembered the information.

Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—which is to recall a piece of information along with contextual details, such as where, when and how one learned it—and knowing something, which is feeling that something is true without remembering how one learned the information. Generally, remembering is a weaker form of memory that is likely to fade unless it is converted into more stable, long-term memory that is "known" from then on. When taking the quiz, volunteers who had read study material on a monitor relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on remembering and knowing. Garland and her colleagues think that students who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching their minds for information from the text, trying to trigger the right memory—they often just knew the answers.

Other researchers have suggested that people comprehend less when they read on a screen because screen-based reading is more physically and mentally taxing than reading on paper. E-ink is easy on the eyes because it reflects ambient light just like a paper book, but computer screens, smartphones and tablets like the iPad shine light directly into people's faces. Depending on the model of the device, glare, pixilation and flickers can also tire the eyes. LCDs are certainly gentler on eyes than their predecessor, cathode-ray tubes (CRT), but prolonged reading on glossy self-illuminated screens can cause eyestrain, headaches and blurred vision. Such symptoms are so common among people who read on screens—affecting around 70 percent of people who work long hours in front of computers—that the American Optometric Association officially recognizes computer vision syndrome.

Erik Wästlund of Karlstad University in Sweden has conducted some particularly rigorous research on whether paper or screens demand more physical and cognitive resources. In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.

In another set of experiments 82 volunteers completed the READ test on computers, either as a paginated document or as a continuous piece of text. Afterward researchers assessed the students' attention and working memory, which is a collection of mental talents that allow people to temporarily store and manipulate information in their minds. Volunteers had to quickly close a series of pop-up windows, for example, sort virtual cards or remember digits that flashed on a screen. Like many cognitive abilities, working memory is a finite resource that diminishes with exertion.

Although people in both groups performed equally well on the READ test, those who had to scroll through the continuous text did not do as well on the attention and working-memory tests. Wästlund thinks that scrolling—which requires a reader to consciously focus on both the text and how they are moving it—drains more mental resources than turning or clicking a page, which are simpler and more automatic gestures. A 2004 study conducted at the University of Central Florida reached similar conclusions.

Attitude adjustments
An emerging collection of studies emphasizes that in addition to screens possibly taxing people's attention more than paper, people do not always bring as much mental effort to screens in the first place. Subconsciously, many people may think of reading on a computer or tablet as a less serious affair than reading on paper. Based on a detailed 2005 survey of 113 people in northern California, Ziming Liu of San Jose State University concluded that people reading on screens take a lot of shortcuts—they spend more time browsing, scanning and hunting for keywords compared with people reading on paper, and are more likely to read a document once, and only once.

When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—strategies such as setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way. In a 2011 experiment at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, college students took multiple-choice exams about expository texts either on computers or on paper. Researchers limited half the volunteers to a meager seven minutes of study time; the other half could review the text for as long as they liked. When under pressure to read quickly, students using computers and paper performed equally well. When managing their own study time, however, volunteers using paper scored about 10 percentage points higher. Presumably, students using paper approached the exam with a more studious frame of mind than their screen-reading peers, and more effectively directed their attention and working memory.

Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social interaction than they currently do. Books on the Kindle can only be loaned once, for example.

To date, many engineers, designers and user-interface experts have worked hard to make reading on an e-reader or tablet as close to reading on paper as possible. E-ink resembles chemical ink and the simple layout of the Kindle's screen looks like a page in a paperback. Likewise, Apple's iBooks attempts to simulate the overall aesthetic of paper books, including somewhat realistic page-turning. Jaejeung Kim of KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence in South Korea and his colleagues have designed an innovative and unreleased interface that makes iBooks seem primitive. When using their interface, one can see the many individual pages one has read on the left side of the tablet and all the unread pages on the right side, as if holding a paperback in one's hands. A reader can also flip bundles of pages at a time with a flick of a finger.

But why, one could ask, are we working so hard to make reading with new technologies like tablets and e-readers so similar to the experience of reading on the very ancient technology that is paper? Why not keep paper and evolve screen-based reading into something else entirely? Screens obviously offer readers experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Moby Dick, but the New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that depend entirely on scrollingand could not appear in print in the same way. Some Web comics and infographicsturn scrolling into a strength rather than a weakness. Similarly, Robin Sloan has pioneered the tap essay for mobile devices. The immensely popular interactive Scale of the Universe tool could not have been made on paper in any practical way. New e-publishing companies like Atavist offer tablet readers long-form journalism with embedded interactive graphics, maps, timelines, animations and sound tracks. And some writers are pairing up with computer programmers to produce ever more sophisticated interactive fiction and nonfiction in which one's choices determine what one reads, hears and sees next.

When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper and ink may still have the advantage. But text is not the only way to read.


Scientific American

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