Summary:Many companies are betting big that electronic book readers will be one of the main ways people read long-form text in the future. However, such products will succeed only if the reading experience is much better than the misery of reading from PC monitors.
A study of people reading long-form text on tablets finds higher reading speeds than in the past, but they're still slower than reading print.
Various types of tablets ought to do better than desktop computers because they offer higher-resolution screens and a more comfy reading posture. But are tablets as good as printed books?
To find out, we conducted a readability study of people reading fiction on the two highest-profile tablets: Apple's iPad (first-generation) and Amazon's Kindle 2.
In contrast to our previous study of iPad application usability, we didn't study a range of user interfaces. Instead, we tested only the default iBook app. Testing a single iPad reader let us more easily compare it with the Kindle, which has only one user interface.
Also, in contrast to our previous analysis of Kindle content usability, we didn't consider non-linear content, such as Web pages or newspapers. Instead, we specifically focused on testing linear, narrative content because it's the primary use case for e-book readers.
Finally, we didn't test the many issues related to choosing and installing reading software, nor did we test the reading UI's learnability. We taught participants how to use the readers before we started measuring their reading speeds.
