Tag Archives: Digital vs Print

Digital vs Print

Both Jabr and Badke discuss the differences between reading digital and print can be. It was such a coincidence that this assignment popped up while I was in the middle of reading a novel I could only get online. The novel titled, Danganronpa Zero, only came out in Japan with no English translation or localisation coming out in the United States. Here it was clear to me how these two different mediums can be. Thanks to the internet, a book that I would’ve needed to not only import and learn a whole new language for was easily accessible.

Reading a novel on a computer screen can be such a different experience. You lose the tactile feel of a page and it becomes nothing but a set of clicks or swipes. The device, be it a phone or computer, also allows you to do more than just read so it can be easy to be distracted.  The words on a screen, depending on the size of your monitor or device, can extend beyond the boundaries of a normal page and make the text feel longer. Even the light of the screen can affect your eyes after extended periods of reading.

However, I personally felt no difference in the enjoyment of the novel. It is still easy to get lost in what you are reading as if it were a regular physical book. There is even a myriad of new affordances brought by digital text. We don’t have to carry them around, we can still take notes and highlight, we can access them through multiple methods, we can choose to listen to them if we don’t have the time to sit down and read it, we can still enjoy a book as normal just perhaps with a different mentality. While we may lose a more personal connection to the book, the medium in which we access our texts shouldn’t affect how we read.