Is a book more user friendly than an e-book?

Question

Lately I've had this thought that books were more user friendly than applications. Why do I say that? Because of these reasons:

1. You can visibly see, at a given time where you are and how much you have left
2. You don't have to rely on anything breaking down (other than your eyes?) in order to read.
3. You can pass it to other people to read and they can give it back, and you can see what they've done to your book.

My question is, is there research that can prove if a book is more user friendly (and more desirable) than an e-book?

Answer 1

Is a book more user friendly than an e-book?

Yes.

But note that an e-book is also more user friendly than a book.

Context is important. Users are important. Objectives and goals are important. And all will play into that question and produce a different answer for different people.

Answer 2

Paper has numerous advantages over a simple digital medium (in addition to those you mentioned):

• You can feel pages (a book is much more physically responsive than a tablet)

• You can use pages to perform various tasks (bookmarking, etc.)

• You can modify it (take notes, highlight)

• Paper has cultural inertia (we have used it pretty much forever)

The digital medium can, for the most part, replicate these features and many modern e-readers provide this and more (including features like instant dictionary lookup, search and hyperlinking, which aren't possible with paper).

Despite this, many studies have findings [1] which show that individuals often still have a preference for paper. An interesting study on making the digital medium more competitive with paper found the digital medium lacking in these affordances [2]:

• Tangibility: paper can be touched, moved around, "zoomed", etc.
• Annotation: as mentioned previously, you easily modify paper
• Page orientation: paper maintains its physical orientation, whereas orientation is easily lost in a digital document (this is probably why e-readers maintain the distinct page metaphor instead of merging all text into a single view)
• Multiple Displays: Paper provides an unlimited amount of "displays" because it is easy to lay anything you need out in front of you
• Sharing: as you mentioned, paper is easily sharable (just hand your book over)
• Legibility: this concern is a bit dated (see e-ink paper and high contrast displays), but this study found that digital displays were harder to read than paper

[1]: Ruth Wilson. 2002. The "look and feel" of an ebook: considerations in interface design. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM symposium on Applied computing (SAC '02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 530-534. DOI=10.1145/508791.508893 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/508791.508893

[2]: Bill N. Schilit, Gene Golovchinsky, and Morgan N. Price. 1998. Beyond paper: supporting active reading with free form digital ink annotations. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '98), Clare-Marie Karat, Arnold Lund, Joëlle Coutaz, and John Karat (Eds.). ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, USA, 249-256. DOI=10.1145/274644.274680 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/274644.274680

Answer 3

It's not. It's just user-friendly in a different way. There are things you cannot do with your ebook - like see at a glance where your bookmark is, read without power (well, e-ink consumes not really much power, but still), you can easily give it to your friend, not loosing a possibility to read another one.

But you cannot instantly send this book at a distance (like sharing fragments via email), read it at night without an external light (some e-readers are backlit) etc.

So it's not a comparison of how much one is user-friendly against the other one but what features gives one and another. They are different, even though the main feature remains the same.

It's like comparing a bike and a car - they are substitutes at some very general level, but when you go deeper you find out that they are completely different stories.

Answer 4

Regarding e-books, there is a distinction between reading from an e-book reader, and reading from a computer screen.

The e-book reader is more similar to the experience of reading from a book, as we can adjust the e-reader/book to our bodies position, where as reading off a screen we must adjust our body to the screen. This could lead to bad posture.

The current problem with reading on screens is that we need to adjust our bodies to our computer screens, rather than the screens adjusting to us,” Dr. Meredith said.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/do-e-readers-cause-eye-strain/?_r=0

Answer 5

More user friendly is in the eye of the beholder in this case, because different users have very different expectations. And there are positives on both sides of the ledger. Some positives for e-books:

• much lighter then a 700 page hard cover.
• binding can't break and lose pages
• surprisingly often more resilient to water issues (my kindle at least, is relatively well sealed, but I have not tried to make it fail)
• better navigation possibilities. How do I get to chapter 27 in a physical book?
• bookmark doesn't fall out when I pick it up the wrong way.
• intuitive variations of progress indicators, progress bar and percentages
• for some e-readers, non-destructive annotation

Answer 6

As with many things in life, it depends on the context and task.

Are you reading a fiction book for pleasure? Are you trying to find a single nugget of information in a large reference? Are you reading in a darkened room next to your sleeping partner?

A few points to consider:

• There is a certain psychological pleasure in holding a real book that is hard to quantify, but if it's an 800-page tome, weight could start to become a hindrance.
• Books are more approachable than e-readers. When people are seated at a coffee table with an array of books on it, they generally feel welcome to pick them up and browse through them. If a page in the book is particularly popular, there's a good chance the book will naturally open to that page. If you replaced those books with a single e-reader, it would probably save you some time dusting, but would it beckon people to browse its contents?
• Even with today's increasingly high resolution displays, books still have a significant advantage in resolution (dots per inch) versus e-readers. I'm not sure whether this amounts to a significant advantage in reading speed or reading pleasure, however.
• E-books are often generated by performing an automatic conversion on a document that was formatted for print. This can result in a poor user experience if, say, things are not oriented correctly or footnotes end up on a different page than you are currently on.
• If any sort of search is required, e-books are going to make life a lot easier.
• Back-lit e-readers can be used in a dark room.
• E-books take up effectively zero physical space and save a lot of trees. The idea of a library running out of space will probably make no sense in the near future, and new libraries can be a lot smaller and cheaper.
• E-readers are still relatively immature compared with books. As they get better and tools to convert between print and e-reader versions of books improve, books will lose most of their advantages.

Answer 7

I would prefer reading an e-book on an iPad in a low light room. It would be a better user experience because the e-book adjusts itself to the user and his surroundings instead of the user adjusting to the book by lighting up the room where he is reading.

Answer 8

You can visibly see, at a given time where you are and how much you have left

You can see the same on an e-reader, since they have progress bars.

You don't have to rely on anything breaking down (other than your eyes?) in order to read.

You can't read a paper book if the electricity goes out at night.

You can pass it to other people to read and they can give it back, and you can see what they've done to your book.

Or they might not give it back. Also I don't see how seeing what they've done to your book is an advantage, since anything done to your book would be negative - writing on it, spilling coffee on it, etc.

When e-books first came out, I didn't think I would ever buy them, since I tend to prefer physical items (such as CDs) over their electronic counterparts (such as MP3s). But after I tried an e-book, I quickly came to the conclusion that they are more user friendly than paper books, for the following reasons (I only have experience with Kindle, but I would assume most of these apply to all e-book platforms):

• You can search for text in an e-book. This is an absolute necessity for certain books.

• A paper book can be lost or stolen or burn in a fire. It could even have missing pages (I've seen this mentioned in a few paper book reviews on Amazon). An e-book will always be there in the cloud (at least with Kindle).

• You can bring one e-reader with you and have access to several e-books whereever you go. Bringing several paper books with you would be cumbersome in terms of space and weight. You don't even need to bring (or own) an e-reader, since there are e-reader apps for smartphones. Kindle even lets you read e-books from the cloud in a web browser.

• You can easily see all of your highlights, annotations, and bookmarks in one place and even search through them. How would you do that with a paper book without having to leaf through every single page?

Answer 9

Personally, I prefer a book to an ebook. It is challenging to focus on reading content for long periods of time via technology, plus the experience of holding a book, turning the pages, and feeling it in your hands is not comparable. That being said, here's a nice piece of research on the best ways to read: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kindle-nook-e-reader-books-the-best-way-to-read/