I love the artificial constraints that researchers put on electronic texts in order to make them look worse than paper.

"To provide experimental support for the idea that the physicality of a text is important for comprehension, psychologist Anne Mangen (2013) [required] half of the subjects [to] read from an unpaginated pdf file…"

Which is to say that the test was about pagination, not about the difference between a PDF on a computer and the same document on paper.

In a test to determine if the back-lighting of LCD based readers would disrupt sleep habits, subjects using the electronic reader have been forced to read for an hour in a fixed position with the brightness turned all the way up. The subjects reading from paper books were free to adjust their position however they wished.

In other tests, the paper version of a document was properly typeset while the electronic version was rendered in the ugliest font available, with hyphenation turned off.

I have yet to see a paper vs electronic study without odds stacked against the electronic reader.

"Noyes and Garland’s experiment (2005) might account for the experience of long- time astronomy professor David Bruning, who believes that today’s digital native students no longer have the patience necessary to truly engage with and understand difficult reading material…"

I wonder if the perceived shift in generational attention spans is due to over-abundance of entertainment material, a surplus of information, and perhaps our favourite medium of TV essentially training us to have thirty second attention spans?

But no, the report pins the blame on computers because they present information on an electronic screen.

"As this article demonstrates, print books are still the best suited to the optical, cognitive, and metacognitive requirements of the reading brain. While e-paper technology has been shown to be the optical equivalent of print on paper, e-readers still are lacking in the physicality that has been shown to be so important for comprehension."

No, the article demonstrates nothing of the sort. The "lack of physicality" was based on a study which endeavoured to remove all traces of physicality from the electronic document: there was no pagination in the electronic document.

The article already addressed the issue that there are no components of the brain uniquely involved in reading, so the "requirements of the reading brain" is a furphy too!

The article can't even agree with its own sources about the difference between written notes and typed notes:

"Given the demonstrated physicality of reading, it seems likely that typing on a keyboard is, to the writing brain, the cognitive equivalent of reading virtual text, and therefore a more indirect and inferior way of achieving understanding."

versus

"Recent experiments by psychologists Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2014) confirm that taking notes in cursive facilitates comprehension better than typing notes on a keyboard, possibly because the greater speed of typing leads to verbatim notes, while note taking in cursive tends to be a synthesis of content in a reader’s own words."

Noting that in the experiment where paper and electronic readers were required to study the texts for the same period of time, they got the same results, while in the experiment where both groups of readers were given as much time as they felt they needed, the electronic readers who were reading on computer screens finished sooner and as a consequence got worse results. Somehow this is a reflection on electronic books, rather than the difference in experience between reading a book that you hold in your hands versus a computer screen that remains in a fixed position, forcing the reader to sit at attention.

The issue of reader reluctance to flip backwards through pages on an electronic reader speaks more to the design of the electronic reader's user experience than some innate value of electronic books. More research needs to be done there.

At best, this paper is a nice bibliography for further study by people interested in correcting some of the poor experimental design.

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As far as anecdotes go: I am no longer comfortable reading from paper books. They are bulky, ungainly, and require me to orient myself in relation to an available light source. With a paper book, I can't simply turn the ambient lighting up or down to a comfortable level and read where I want. Even worse, with a paper book, regardless of what markings and annotations I use, I am forced to remember where in the book the information is that I want. In an electronic book, I only need to remember which book contains the information I want. The electronic book reader will help me with the fine navigation.

I agree with the suggestion that handwritten notes encourage better learning outcomes, for exactly the reason suggested in this article (the quote earlier in my reply about hand written notes encouraging the student to rephrase the concept in their own words). Again, I don't have any experimental evidence to support my supposition, so I'll just cherry pick the study that supports my opinion :)