Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on my article. As someone with a background in art history who is just beginning an MLIS, I truly appreciate reading well-informed critiques of my work in digital text comprehension. I have to admit I did not perceive any bias in the studies I cited in my paper, but it might be that my short summaries did not well represent the parameters of the experiments. I hope you might reconsider their validity in light of some additional explanations:

I agree that Anne Mangen’s 2012 experiment was about pagination, one aspect of the physicality of a book. She had one group of 10th-graders read continuous digital text that had to be scrolled, while another group of 10th-graders read the same text from four printed pages. The readers of the paper condition performed better on the comprehension test. Mangen interpreted this result to mean that the lack of physicality of continuous screen text inhibits comprehension. Your comments, and those of jcr, lead me to believe that digital text pagination is already common practice and acknowledged as important for comprehension, so it may not have been necessary for me to include this study in my article.

Of course, the readers of digital text in Mangen’s experiment might have performed better with the page-at-a-time text presentation of an e-reader, something I acknowledged in the article. However, an experiment in metacognitive reading strategies conducted in 2013 by Sara J. Margolin found that students who read from current-technology e-readers were less likely to page back to review previously read material. The perceived unwieldiness of paging back on an e-reader might account for the e-reader test group’s slightly lower scores on the comprehension test, by 4 points on a 100-point scale.

As for your contention that “requirements of the reading brain” is a furphy, given that no components of the brain exist uniquely for reading, I would disagree. As explained in my article, according to cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, the reading brain adapts neural structures originally developed for vision, object recognition, and spoken language to reading. Working in concert, these structures—originally evolved for real-world navigation and communication—do seem to have spatial requirements that are not completely satisfied by digital text. To the reading brain, meaning conveyed by words occupies a specific, physical location in the text—the top or bottom of a page, verso or recto on a two-page spread, and at a certain level in the page stack. Anyone who has ever searched through a book with visual memory of the location of a previously read fact can attest to the spatial requirements of the reading brain.

Finally, you question the opinions of long-time astronomy professor David Bruning, who attributes his students’ inability to truly engage with and learn from digital texts to the medium itself. I think Bruning would agree with you that the “over-abundance of entertainment material, a surplus of information, and perhaps our favourite medium of TV” are all contributing to his students’ lack of focus. But he further contends that, since these distractions are just a few clicks away during screen reading, one’s concentration—especially when it comes to studying new, more challenging material—is inevitably compromised. Bruning himself finds it difficult to learn from digital texts, so he would disagree that the problem is confined to millennials; in his view the problem lies with the computer platform, not with the person reading digital text. Although Bruning’s opinions are primarily based on his subjective observations of students through the years, he also cites the work of cognitive researchers in support of his opinions. The short quote form Bruning’s article that I included in my paper does not do justice to his argument; anyone looking for a complete explanation of his preference for print over digital should read his original article: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/ehost/pdf...

Thank you again for taking the time to read and comment on my paper, which was really only intended as a summary of current research for librarians in collection development. If it could also serve, even by negative example, as a guide for further research in digital vs print comprehension studies, I would only be pleased!