I am such a voracious reader that I have long abandoned the printed page. Don’t get me wrong, I have hundreds of books and am loathe to get rid of them, even though the chances of reading even a handful of them are minimal. With bookshelves already groaning, it is a question of storage. The cheaper option was to buy a Digital reader than to build an extension to house an ever-growing library.

Convenience, portability, never being without something to read are some of the obvious attractions of going digital, but I do miss the touch and feel of a physical book. I also wonder whether an overuse of digital readers has an impact on my Comprehension of what I am reading and the ability to retain what I have read. One of the reasons that I have turned to reviewing the books I read is that the process forces me to pay particular attention to what I am reading and that I also I have a record – yes, in digital form – of what it was all about.

That there is some substance to my fears is evidenced by a study published in the ever popular Review of Educational Research conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Valencia. After analysing more than two dozen studies on reading comprehension conducted between 2020 and 2022 involving some 470,000 participants, they have concluded that print reading over a long period could boost comprehension skills by six to eight times more than digital reading does.

The reasons for the association between frequency of digital reading for leisure and text comprehension being close to zero, they suggest, are that the linguistic quality of digital texts tend to be lower and that the mindset for digital reading tends to be shallower with the text being scanned rather than being immersed in. Reading on multi-tasking equipment can be distracting with constant interruptions from other social media programs running on the machine. On the positive side, the negative relationship between digital reading found in primary school children turns positive amongst secondary school pupils.

Digital books read on a single purpose machine might be a different matter, of course. It is a fascinating area of study, but, for now, spatial reasons dictate that I maintain my digital habit.