The headlong rush in education to electronic textbooks and other digital books fundamentally changes how people read for learning, argues Naomi Baron in How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio. School administrators and teachers have adopted electronic textbooks as cost-cutting measures without thinking about how reading on a device differs from reading in print. Libraries have adopted digital books for ease of use, their accessibility features, as well as the fact that they are available even when the facility is closed. Still, patrons have not been educated on how to effectively read in a digital environment. Readers enjoy the portability of hundreds of digital titles but have neither necessarily thought about what is lacking in their reading experience when one cannot hold a book, nor how a digital device may affect the way they read. An expert in the field of reading, Baron summarizes two decades of research from around the world on the impact of digital books on reading. She presents avenues educators and school librarians must explore to ensure that students are properly equipped with the tools they will need to successfully read to learn in multiple formats and achieve the multiple literacies our society increasingly demands.
For thousands of years prior to reading becoming the primary means of transmitting information, orality was the preferred method, and in many cultures it was the only method (Baron, 2021, p. 186). The rise of reading as a means of learning is a recent phenomenon (Baron, 2021, p. 157; Fisher, 2004, p 214), and its nearly ubiquitous presence as a social norm is even newer. An individual must be taught the skills necessary to decode information. Students have been taught from a young age that reading as a model consists of using eyes to go through lines of text in a more or less linear fashion and from the front cover to the back cover. The reading people perform today does not remotely resemble that model of reading. Digital reading on social media and websites is changing how individuals read and why they read, Baron (2021) argues (p. 78). Individuals now tend to read small chunks of texts on a device, listen to podcasts or audiobooks while doing other activities, or watch videos to entertain themselves or learn new skills. All of these are literary activities that provide the “reader” with information. The definition of reading, Baron asserts, needs to change to reflect today’s reality that literacy has transformed in the last hundred years, from the ability to read and write basic texts to the need to comprehend increasingly complex sets of information (Baron, 2021, p. 13).
School librarians are both purchasers and consumers of digital books. They understand how digital media is consumed. They know how to operate digital books. Due to their role at the center of the school’s scholarly activities, school librarians are therefore well-positioned to facilitate this change. They must educate both teachers and students on this changing literacy and present ways for readers to adapt the skills they already possess to a new form of reading.
The first step is to recognize that there are differences between digital literacy and print literacy. Print books are self-contained within the physical object. The object presents itself the way the author meant it to appear, aside from possible editorial and formatting decisions in production. It also provides visual landmarks indicating where the reader is in relation to the size of the book, specific chapters, or even individual pages, for example, remembering that critical graph on the page next to the photo of the Grand Canyon or noticing that a book is twice the size of another book. Print books provide great cover art that can be admired. They can also be shared with friends or given away.
On the other hand, print books can be cumbersome and expensive, require storage when not in use, and can easily be damaged or lost. Digital books are well suited for certain purposes such as quickly locating information, shallow reading, scrolling, and improved accessibility features that benefit students with visual impairments as well as those with dyslexia. Digital books are generally less expensive than print books and are much more convenient to access and dispose of after reading. Digital books are often more engaging than print books due to interactive features and embedded multimedia. Digital books provide hyperlinks to other elements, such as chapters, footnotes, other webpages, etc. The reader can modify page layouts and font size, changing the way the author intended the book to look. Digital books embed multimedia files such as audio and video. They are easy to access, are portable, cannot be damaged or lost, and present no storage difficulties. Digital books are not easily shared, they do not provide the reader a visual landscape, and they are often read quickly and superficially, with limited engagement with the text (Baron, 2021, p. 68).
Audiobooks provide exposure to literary texts, increase the quantity of literature students consume, and help generate positive attitudes toward reading (Wolfson, 2008). They can be sped up, helping students with ADHD better focus on what they hear. However, digital books are not conducive to deep and reflective reading requiring frequent pauses and engagement with the text (Baron, 2021, p. 121). Audiobooks and videos possess similar features to digital books with additional drawbacks. These include the inability to quickly rewind or locate a relevant passage or the lack of visible landmarks to quickly search for specific locations within the content (Baron, 2021., p. 166).
The second step is to consider that not all forms of reading are equal. Reading fiction is different from reading informational texts, which differs from reading posts on social media or signs on the side of the highway. Baron notes that data analyzed from the 2009 international PISA test showed that students who reported reading fiction regularly had higher reading scores than those who did not read on a regular basis. Students who reported reading informational texts regularly did not have higher scores than students who did not read on a regular basis (Baron, 2021, p. 26). This effect of reading long forms of fiction also showed improved overall reading comprehension. Yet, most of the online reading being done in schools and on standardized tests are of short texts, affecting both comprehension and reading stamina (Baron, 2021, p. 117).. Stamina is necessary to read long texts such as books and scholarly articles. Still, the digital environment provides information into bite-size pieces that can easily be consumed in a few seconds or minutes. These limited reading opportunities, along with the distractibility factor of devices and the rise of audio and video media, have shortened the attention span of the typical reader (Attention! Attention!, 2017, p. 36). Devices allow for quick reading but do not facilitate deep reading. Most readers are unaware of these differences between print and digital. They blaze through digital books like they were short websites, finding themselves surprised when they don’t remember much of what they read (Singer & Alexander, 2017).
The news is not all bad, Baron notes. Digital books can fulfill many roles in the educational system. School librarians and teachers must prepare their students by explicitly demonstrating appropriate techniques to foster a deeper level of engagement with the text and to reflect on what is being read. For starters, students should not be multitasking. Devices make it easy to multitask, and even reading print is often interrupted by the desire to check notifications, answer messages, or peruse social media (Baron, 2021, p. 77). When listening to audiobooks, readers must focus on what they hear, since the mind has a greater tendency to drift away from sound than from print. Stopping the flow of reading impedes their cognitive efforts and hinders their comprehension. Regardless of the format being read, students need to take notes about what they are actively reading (Baron, 2021, p. 36). They must be comfortable with flipping the pages backwards or rewinding audio or video. They should write up a summary of what was read along with a series of keywords that relate to what they just learned (Baron, 2021, p. 138). Students need the modeling of good print and digital reading and the opportunity to explore these different media types (Baron, 2021, p. 228), something school librarians can provide. For their part, teachers should generate questions ahead of time to guide students’ attention to specific themes or sections and should consider supporting documentation to build or enhance prior knowledge. This will help students become biliterate and able to recognize the different purposes of each medium.It also helps them to develop techniques that make each media better for a specific purpose, and build an understanding of the limitations that each medium possesses.
What can school librarians do to help students and teachers through this transition to a different definition of reading? First, they need to continue to promote reading in all of its forms. Especially in the younger grades, school librarians need to work with families to help them promote reading at home as well. Evidence suggests that reading fiction improves both reading comprehension and overall reading abilities (Baron, 2021, p. 26). Fiction is particularly suited for print reading. Second, school librarians need to offer books for pleasure reading and books for research in multiple formats. They need to purchase different reading formats and offer students the opportunity to read print, digital or audio versions of their favorite books. Third, school librarians must work closely with therapists and teachers, especially English teachers, to teach effective techniques for deep reading with digital and listening to audio formats, including writing annotations, summarizing what is being read, and creating lists of keywords. Learning how to navigate digital and audiobooks, including rewinding or scrolling back to read or listen again, is also essential. Finally, teachers themselves are not necessarily familiar with the features that their textbooks possess. School librarians need to help teachers who use digital books exploit this format’s strengths, from the easy searching capabilities to the differentiated texts and the ability to make annotations right in the textbook. School librarians must work with teachers to educate students about best practices when using digital books.
Ultimately, Baron argues, readers must ask themselves the following question: What is the purpose of their reading in that particular time and place? Training students to answer this question and to know their purpose when reading is the most effective way for school librarians to help students determine which book medium is best situated to fulfill their reading needs at any given time. Still, some questions remain unanswered at this time. What will the future of reading hold? Will digital reading transform how we currently define reading? Will small bursts of information texts become the privileged form of reading?
Despite these currently unanswerable questions, Baron’s closing advice does not ring less true: “Read more. Focus when you do. Medium matters'' (2021, p. 230). School librarians could not agree more!
References
Attention! Attention! (2017). New Scientist, 233(3112), 36.
Fisher, S. R. (2004). A history of reading. Reaktion Books.
Singer, L. M., & Alexander, P. A. (2017). Reading across mediums: Effects of reading digital and print texts on comprehension and calibration. Journal of Experimental Education, 85(1), 155–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2016.1143794
Wolfson, G. (2008). Using audiobooks to meet the needs of adolescent readers. American Secondary Education, 36(2), 105–114.
