I would love to see a similar study done with textbooks and school books:

iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox): “The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability.”

Even though I don’t plan on buying another eBook anytime soon, I don’t place much importance on this study (and I use that word loosely since the data set was 32 people and there were many undefined variables not nailed down).

Nonetheless, some people will point to this as yet another reason print is better than an iPad or Kindle, especially in the education world. We can’t necessarily do that with this information, but it will provide good tidbits for cocktail party chats. Also, it’s just interesting to see the difference in reader experiences, even in a small data set.

In my current opinion, print is optimal at this stage in our human story because of these points made so well by Nathan Schneider.

As a Middle School Teacher, I’ll gladly assert all day that speed means nothing when it comes to reading. The key to a reading platform’s success or failure is its ability to provide interaction (or get out of the way of that interaction).

Now if only we could gauge critical interaction with texts in a test format that didn’t involve shading in bubbles…