6.4: Invited Paper: Impact of the Use of a Touch‐based Digital Reading Device in Immersive Reading

Abstract

This paper describes experiments to evaluate the impact of the use of a touch‐based digital reading device in immersive reading. The first experiment compared the performance of proofreading between that using paper documents and that using a touch‐based reading device. Results showed that participants detected more errors when reading from paper than when reading from the digital device. During reading, participants interacted with text such as pointing to words or brushing over sentences more frequently when reading from paper than when reading from the digital device. This suggests that interaction with text plays an important role in proofreading tasks. To verify this hypothesis, in the second experiment, participants proofread documents with constrained interaction with paper. Results showed that participants detected more errors when reading with text interaction than when reading without text interaction. Considering these results, we discuss practical implications to improve the usability of digital reading devices.

What academics want when reading digitally

“…The importance of tangibility has been confirmed by previous studies [4,6,7,8]. Physical touch plays an important role in collaborative work on a paper as well as in proof-reading [14]. Interestingly, age affected the importance of tangibility (χ 2 (4) = 15.5399, p = 0.003703; Fisher p = 0.003648) with only participants older than 25 mentioning it.…”