Books on screen. The consequences of digital fiction reading

The digitalization of fiction reading is proliferating with the increasing spread of digital reading devices (tablets, smartphones or e-readers) and availability of digital texts, likely to make books on screen a lasting phenomenon.
While motivations for fiction screen reading and educational usage of digital texts are rather well explored phenomena, little attention has been paid to the consequences of digitalization for the experience of narrative fiction. Public and scholarly debates hitherto discuss screen reading largely as threat to literary culture and fear declines in literary reading in quality and quantity. This transdisciplinary project combining literary studies and communication science seeks to provide empirical evidence to the debate, investigating possibly qualitatively different reading experiences of literary texts on paper vs. on screen. Are there any measureable differences in the reading experience if the same literary narrative is read on screen or in a printed book, and if yes, how does the transition from printed to digital reading devices affect crucial dimensions of the literary experience such as (1) narrative understanding (2) imagination, (3) immersion, (4) empathy and (5) analytical reading? This timely question is approached by drawing on two experiments and a series of focus groups, taking into account different facets of the complex process of fiction reading. It adds novel insights to the fields of literary and reading studies as well as media studies, while informative for teachers, publishing houses and booksellers, and the whole educational and cultural sector.
While the infamous claim ‘the medium is the message’ found prominence in the field of media studies, and while communication science and educational psychology have pointed to medium differences in terms of learning outcomes, it is the recent research by Mangen and colleagues that remains among the few to study medium differences as relating to literary experience. This project continues this line of work, theoretically drawing on the role of cognitive control systems, the phenomenological nature of the interaction between reader and reading devise and the related perspective of embodied cognition. Accordingly, it is argued that the five dimensions of literary experience singled out above would be differentially influenced by consumption of literary texts on screen vs. on paper. In addition, the project considers a number of potentially important conditioning factors relating to the text itself, the medium and the reader, narrative complexity, medium distraction, and readers’ literary and digital experiences. Two factorial experiments are conducted in which participants read a literary text on paper and on e-reading devices. These are followed by purposively sampled focus groups to further interpret and contextualize our experimental findings and provide a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that were identified.