Do Adolescents Prefer Electronic Books to Paper Books?

Margaret Merga

doi:10.3390/publications3040237

Abstract

While electronic books offer a range of benefits and may be supposed to be more appealing to young people than paper books, this assumption is often treated as fact by educational researchers. Understanding adolescents’ true current preferences is essential, as incorrect assumptions can lead to decisions which restrict adolescent access to their preferred book mode. The belief that adolescents prefer electronic books to paper books has already led to some school libraries being expunged of paper books. As adolescents show a higher level of aliteracy than younger children, and regular reading offers a broad range of benefits for young people, it is imperative that school’s decisions around providing access to books are responsive to adolescent students’ genuine preferences. This paper analyses the current and relevant academic research around adolescent preferences for book modes, finding that, at present, the contention that adolescents prefer electronic books is not supported by the available research. In addition, there are a number of issues identified that make analyzing the findings in this area problematic. Future studies in this area are needed before an adolescent preference for electronic books can be unequivocally substantiated.

Highlights

The advent of the eReader has led to exciting new possibilities for reading books
The eBook is read on an eReader, with reading eBooks either the primary purpose (e.g., Kindle and Kobo eReaders) or part of the multiple purposes offered by the device
In addition to the benefits previously listed, there are a number of reasons that educators may wish that adolescents show a preference for eBooks, and often this desire evolves into a strongly held belief, the empirical basis of which is the central point of contention addressed in this paper. Even raising it as a point of contention is controversial in the face of the strong push in education to be modern and embrace the “new”, to maintain the relevance of the learning experiences that we provide, and to equip our students to be proficient communicators in an environment where digital literacy skills are important, highly valued, and increasingly measured for the purposes of comparison, by mechanisms such as the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Digital Reading Literacy

Summary

Introduction

The advent of the eReader has led to exciting new possibilities for reading books. While eBooks have been in existence since 1971 [1], the 2007 entry of Amazon into the device market, coupled with its strong distribution focus, has led to increased interest in eReaders [2]. An eBook is any electronic file (e.g., mobi or epub) containing text, which, if in paper form, would be recognized as a book. As such, this definition encompasses both fiction and non-fiction, and it excludes non-book text types such as journal articles

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