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Reading is a multi-sensory activity, entailing perceptual, cognitive and motor interactions with whatever is being read. With digital technology, reading manifests itself as being extensively multi-sensory -both in more explicit and more complex ways than ever before. In different ways from traditional reading technologies such as the codex, digital technology illustrates how the act of reading is intimately connected with and intricately dependent on the fact that we are both body and mind -a fact carrying important implications for even such an apparently intellectual activity as reading, whether recreational, educational or occupational. This article addresses some important and hitherto neglected issues concerning digital reading, with special emphasis on the vital role of our bodies, and in particular our fingers and hands, for the immersive fiction reading experience. Reading with new technologiesThe ways we read are constantly being moulded by whatever technological innovations, devices and platforms come around. The print book is presently being challenged by the computer and, perhaps in particular, the e-book. Digital technology also pervades our surroundings -eloquently suggested by expressions such as ubiquitous and invisible technology, and pervasive computing. Laptops and e-books are beginning to replace print textbooks in schools. More and more of our daily reading is reading from screens, or from some version of electronic reading tablets or mobile technology, rather than reading from print. This raises a number of important research questions concerning digital (screen) reading compared with print reading -no doubt pedagogically, but also generically: how does digital technology change the ways we read?Theorists across disciplinary boundaries largely agree that we read differently when reading digital texts, compared with when reading print. Moreover, not only is our screen reading distinctly different from print reading, but our reading modes and habits in general are changing due to steadily increasing exposure to digital texts

In the course of digitisation, the range of substrates for textual reading is being expanded to include a number of screen-based technologies and reading devices, such as e-readers (e.g. Kindle) and tablets (e.g. iPad). These technologies have distinctly different affordances than paper has. Given that textual reading is at the same time likely to remain important as a cultural practice, and is undergoing massive change as digital screens are supplementing paper -with the potential to replace it as the dominant substrate -there is an urgent need to investigate what effects such change might have on the reading of different kinds of texts, for different purposes. This article proposes the need for an integrative, transdisciplinary model of embodied, textual reading accounting for its psychological, ergonomic, technological, social, cultural and evolutionary aspects. The envisaged model aims to be partly explanatory, in the sense that it aligns and integrates existing knowledge, and partly exploratory, in the sense that it points to blank spots in our knowledge where further research is needed. The model will thus serve to guide the planning of such further research, and to make research more compatible and research outcomes more widely useable.

Digital reading devices such as Kindle differ from paper books with respect to the kinesthetic and tactile feedback provided to the reader, but the role of these features in reading is rarely studied empirically. This experiment compares reading of a long text on Kindle DX and in print. Fifty participants (24 years old) read a 28 page (∼1 h reading time) long mystery story on Kindle or in a print pocket book and completed several tests measuring various levels of reading comprehension: engagement, recall, capacities to locate events in the text and reconstructing the plot of the story. Results showed that on most tests subjects performed identically whatever the reading medium. However, on measures related to chronology and temporality, those who had read in the print pocket book, performed better than those who had read on a Kindle. It is concluded that, basically comprehension was similar with both media, but, because kinesthetic feedback is less informative with a Kindle, readers were not as efficient to locate events in the space of the text and hence in the temporality of the story. We suggest that, to get a correct spatial representation of the text and consequently a coherent temporal organization of the story, readers would be reliant on the sensorimotor cues which are afforded by the manipulation of the book.

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