The Science Behind Why You Should Keep Reading Print Books
1. They’re Better For Your Sleep.
It’s well documented that looking at your computer screen right before bed has a negative effect on your sleep patterns. Yet even though we know that it’s bad for us, it can be really hard to kick the habit. (You can pry my phone out of cold dead hands right before bed! And you might have to… Some studies have linked screen time to premature death). But one way to cut down on screen time can be to read paper books vs e-books.
2. They’re Vital For Childhood Development and Comprehension.
Everyone knows that reading to your kid is a good thing. But it turns out that all reading isn’t equal! An article from the New York Times outlines the problem with using e-readers with children. They site a 2013 study in which researchers discovered that when children (ages 3-5) were read to from an electronic book, they had a lower reading comprehension score than children being read to from a traditional story book.
3. Paper Books Help With Reading Retention.
It’s simply that when we read on a screen, the way we read is different. As reported in Scientific American, a 2005 survey at San Jose University by Ziming Liu, found that screens cause people to take shortcuts when reading. They look for keywords and absorb them rather than reading things sentence by sentence as we do on paper. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just different. We consume online magazines and blogs to get quick, punchy information that we can carry with us temporarily. So essentially, we’ve been trained to skip to the good parts. And for many of the articles we read online, that’s okay.
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Sometimes I do wish that the computer was never allowed to become mainstream. It HAS taken so much enjoyment out of life.