E-Book Reading Practices in Different Subject Areas: An Exploratory Log Analysis

Print books pose inherent difficulties for researchers who want to observe users’ natural in-book reading patterns. With e-books and logs of their use, it is now possible to track several aspects of users’ interactions inside e-books, including the number and duration of their sessions with an e-book and the order in which pages are viewed. This chapter reports on a study of one year of EBL user log data from Purdue University to identify different reading patterns or ways in which users navigate within different types of e-books—authored monographs vs. edited collections—and in e-books in different subject areas. The results of the analysis revealed a few differences in the reading patterns used for e-books of different types and subject areas, but more striking was the similarity in reading patterns across the e-books. Greater differences occurred between individual users, and these differences are best explained by differences in individuals’ personal reading objectives. The analysis of reading logs for e-books is still very much a new venture. From this perspective, the findings are exploratory and descriptive rather than conclusive, and as much about the evolution of workable methodologies as they are about the results of the analysis. Log analysis reveals nothing about users’ circumstances or intentions; however, if used in tandem with usability studies, and studies based on surveys, diaries, and interviews, it could contribute to a more objective understanding of users’ interactions with e-books. 14 224 | Academic E-Books bAckground And IntroductIon In the ancient world, reading was usually done out loud. In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel (1996) recounts a story from the Confessions of St. Augustine in which Augustine tells of the time he paid a visit to Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. Augustine observed Ambrose reading: “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent, and his tongue was still” (Confessions, 6, 3, as cited by Manguel, 1996, p. 42). This was remarkable to Augustine because reading silently was something out of the ordinary. Like Augustine’s observation, most objective descriptions of silent reading have focused on its physiognomic aspects (i.e., reading posture, facial expression, and movements of the hands, fingers, tongue, lips, and eyes). In the 19th and 20th centuries, many scientific studies of reading concentrated on readers’ visual behavior or eye movements. Methods of tracking eye movements included the corneal reflection and the scleral observation methods, both of which required holding the subject’s head in a fixed position. Other methods involved attaching monitors to the subject’s eye while the subject scanned a page or read lines of text. Another study placed the reader in a darkened room with a text and a flashlight. “The use of a light is clearly somewhat unnatural for the reader,” the educational psychologist A. K. Pugh (1977) noted, “but the restrictions on the subject are less than in most of the eye-movement recording methods” (p. 42). Pugh discussed a fundamental discovery resulting from Louis-Émile Javal’s early eye-movement studies; when reading or scanning, human eyes do not move smoothly, but rather make jerky movements (saccades) and stop several times, moving very quickly between each stop (fixation). The movements measured in these experiments are very small, and the subjects read only relatively short texts (Pugh, 1978, p. 14). Marshall (2009) notes that, although eye tracking “provides important data about some aspects of reading—word and letter recognition, most importantly—it has not shed as much light on how people read in the wild,” that is, read naturally (p. 101). Other controlled reading studies give test subjects identical reading material with instructions, observe and record subjects’ actions (e.g., through video recording), and, in some studies, ask them all the same series of questions. User studies often are conducted to inform improvements in the design of products, including printed and digital documents E-Book Reading Practices in Different Subject Areas | 225 and webpages. A study by Liesaputra and Witten (2008) compared users’ interactions with print books and different e-book formats, including one that simulated a 3-D book with realistic page turning. Still, the nature of silent reading makes it difficult to study and measure in the laboratory. The fact that the act of observing affects the behavior being observed means that such research can only go a short way toward describing reader behavior. Reading researchers have long recognized the need for observations or field work in natural situations. In Reading and Writing the Electronic Book, C.C. Marshall (2009), who has observed natural reader behaviors for Microsoft Research, identifies the following kinds of field studies: surveys and questionnaires, interview and diary studies, and studies using instrumenting software that logs details of user interactions with digital technologies such as e-books. Since the advent of e-books, academic librarians have been conducting surveys to determine how well e-books are catching on with students and faculty. Among the larger surveys of students and faculty by librarians are Levine-Clark (2006), who received 2,067 responses at the University of Denver; Nicholas and colleagues (2008), who received 1,818 responses at University College London; Li, Poe, Potter, Quigley and Wilson (2011), who received 2,569 responses from the University of California; and CorlettRivera and Hackman (2014), who received 1,343 responses from students and faculty in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Maryland. These surveys posed questions to members of a target population to gauge their awareness of, use of, and attitudes about e-books of different types (i.e., scholarly monographs, edited collections, and reference works) vis-à-vis other kinds of written materials, especially print books. The surveys also collected demographic data from respondents as to their college, department, and status. This information allows potentially useful comparisons between subgroups in the population. For example, when the Maryland survey asked users to indicate what format they prefer for scholarly monographs (print, e-book, no preference, it depends), results showed that 41% of all respondents preferred print, including 44% of faculty and 40% of graduate student respondents. The next question asked their format preference for edited collections: faculty preferred print to e-books, 36% to 25%, but graduate students chose e-books over print, 37% to 31% (Corlett-Rivera & Hackman, 2014, p. 268). Although most questions in surveys are tied to 226 | Academic E-Books multiple-choice answers, there are usually a few open-ended questions that allow respondents to elaborate on “it depends” and provide details about their experience with—and within—particular texts. For instance, regarding his preferred format for scholarly monographs, a Maryland respondent wrote that it “depends on the urgency that I am reading with and what my end goal is, i.e. research, paper writing, personal betterment” (CorlettRivera & Hackman, 2014, p. 270). Diary-based studies, supported by interviews, can provide an even closer look at reading behaviors because subjects (often students) write down—or are supposed to write down—some details not only about what they read, but also about the context and purpose of their reading (i.e., preparing for classes, preparing for exams, reviewing texts for research, gaining specific information, or learning new topics). With knowledge of the students’ assignments and the tasks they perform, the investigators are able to identify different reading practices or techniques applied to different tasks and subjects. In a diary-based study of 39 University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering graduate students attempting to use Kindle DX e-readers to accomplish their academic reading, Thayer and colleagues (2011) analyzed the meta-level relationship between reading tasks and associated reading techniques. Students recorded their academic and leisure reading activities, including specific tasks that proved difficult to perform on the Kindle DX, such as marking up texts, using references, using illustrations, and creating cognitive maps. Thayer and colleagues then associated each task with specific reading techniques, or “styles,” defined by A. K. Pugh (1978, pp. 52–55): • Receptive reading: reading sequentially from beginning to end with little variation in pace, to find out what an author has to say; • Responsive reading: active engagement with arguments in the text, with frequent changes of pace, pauses, rereading; • Skimming: a quick overview of the structure or content of a text to locate potentially useful information; • Searching: looking in a general way for answers to a question; • Scanning: searching for a specific word or phrase. Nonacademic and leisure reading of novels and short articles indicated receptive reading; text markup indicated responsive reading; and using E-Book Reading Practices in Different Subject Areas | 227 references and using illustrations indicated skimming. Skimming also was associated with creating cognitive maps, the way readers notice and remember the physical location of information within a text and its spatial relationship to other locations in the text as a whole (Thayer et al., 2011, pp. 2921–2924). The study concluded that electronic documents on the Kindle DX were well suited to receptive reading, searching, and scanning, but were not suited to responsive reading and skimming. Before there were digital texts and computer logs, it was nearly impossible to study natural reading behavior over many pages of text. It was obtrusive and even “creepy” (Marshall, 2009, p. 96). It was also seldom done (McKay, 2011, p. 204). With user session logs, researchers are now able to collec