Interesting article on ebooks

I was googling god knows what and came across this link:

Does The Brain Like eBooks?

I remember when I first got online--about 10-15yrs ago-- I hated it!

The screen was too busy with too much and too many things going on. The whole think gave me a headache.

Now I've got a million tabs and windows open, logged in to email, twitter and facebook simultaneously, and have the tv on in the background. But this comment touched a nerve re my early days online:

Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (”sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in.

I love my SONY e-reader, but to be honest, I only use it is during travel on public transportation. If I'm going to curl-up on the couch or do some reading in bed, only the paper version will do. I read in part to relax and de-stress, and perhaps some of the issues touched upon in the article are the part of the reason I prefer reading/holding a *real* book in certain instances.

Anywho, there are several contibutors to the article--

Alan Liu, English professor
Sandra Aamodt, author, “Welcome to Your Brain”
Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development
David Gelernter, computer scientist
Gloria Mark, professor of informatics


--and I think it makes for interstin reading. Go forth and read.