Bodies, books, and screens: The materiality of reading

Abstract

Despite an explosive growth in the commercial availability of e-books, the printed book continues to be most people’s preferred choice. How do we explain this persistent popularity? The purpose of this article is to investigate this issue. The article first discusses a cognitive approach, which primarily understands reading as a visual process. The problem with this strictly visual focus is that it underestimates the role of reading media. Therefore, the article introduces a postphenomenological approach, which takes its starting point in our bodily use of technological artefacts. This approach enables us to analyse how reading media shape, affect, or ‘mediate’ our reading experiences. The article then introduces Anne Mangen’s research, which shows that printed books invite us to linger, whereas screens incline us toward curnamic
caused by the material affordances of reading media or could it be caused by learned habits?