Which do you prefer? A good old-fashioned paper book? Or a new-fangled e-book? The tactile experience of thumbing the pages as the story unfolds? Or the convenience of a huge digital library in one sleek device?
While the subjective experience is one of taste, the objective observations of science are starting to point to traditional paper books as the superior medium.
For example, a 2023 article by authors Lidia Altamura, Cristina Vargas, and Ladislao Salmerón conducted a meta-analysis of studies performed over 20 years (2000-2022) involving more than 460,000 participants.
A meta-analysis is a statistical method to combine data systematically from multiple studies to develop a single conclusion. This approach intends to have greater statistical power than a single small study alone, i.e., the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Altamura et al. concluded that “leisure digital reading does not seem to pay off in terms of reading comprehension, at least, as much as traditional print reading does.” The improvement in comprehension is six to eight times better from paper to e-book.