Books on screen. The consequences of digital fiction reading

At least since the 18th century literary culture is based on the technique of concentrated, immersive and long reading of narrative fiction. Such deep reading has for long been considered the appropriate and natural form of consuming novels and fiction narratives. Obviously deep reading was never the only way of consuming narrative fiction, but it is the reading practice which literary studies takes for granted, still charged as the adequate way to read narrative fiction. Recently it is argued that this naturalness is going to disappear as the digitization of literature advances through increasing spread of e-books and hence reading on screen practices.While e-book sales have been slowing down recently in the German language market, still a marked number of 29 million e-books were sold in Germany in 2017 according to numbers from the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels. Readers of e-books are increasingly seen in day-to-day experiences, but also in schools and universities. Educators are discussing whether e-books should replace printed books in the future. A central assumption coming from both cultural and media studies as well as communication science and media psychology relates to differential reading habits and experiences based on different media types. As Debray pointedly states: Historians of the written know (...) that the history of signs starts with the history of the material. () There is no innocent substrate, every substrate takes its toll. (translation by author)1 This research project looks at how the literary experience differs when literary texts are not consumed in the form of a printed book, but on a screen. Concretely it considers the reception of literary long form texts of different degrees of complexity. As a complex phenomenon such as literary experience can only be adequately investigated by drawing on a transdisciplinary approach, this project unites competencies from literary studies and communication science. In a series of experiments, drawing on theoretical insights from literary studies, reading studies, communication science and media psychology, the project investigates the influences of different reading media printed book, e-reader and tablet on central dimensions of the reading experiences such as 1) narrative understanding, 2) imagination, 3) immersion, 4) empathy and 5) analytical reading. Findings will be interpreted based on a series of focus groups. Insights beyond the related academic fields will be relevant for societal organizations that convey reading culture, such as schools, university, book sellers and publishing houses or libraries. 1 Debray, Régis: Einführung in die Mediologie. Bern, Stuttgart, Wien: Haupt 2003, p. 54f.

With e-readers, smartphones, notebooks, and tablets, new reading media have emerged whose haptics, spatiality, visuality, and materiality are fundamentally different from those of the traditional book and which are characterized by a range of different text representations and associated acts of use In public debates, reading on screen is often discussed as a threat to reading culture, but so far too little attention has been paid to the specific consequences of the digitization of literary texts, as opposed to informative texts, for the reading process. In this sense, the primary goal of the project was to investigate the consequences of the digitization of narrative texts, based on various empirical methods and with a broad and multifaceted f ocus. With a transdisciplinary research approach, the project combined competencies from literary studies, communication science, and psychology, and a mixed-methods design was used to conduct a review of the current state of research, a laboratory experiment, a focus group study, a meta-analysis, and a survey. The central result of our empirical investigations into the question of the consequences of reading digitized literature compared to printed books can be summarized as follows: we could not identify the main changes in the concrete act of reading, text comprehension, or literary experience, but rather in the reading and usage practices of books. Regarding both the amount of reading and the selection of texts, reading places and situations, as well as the forms of acquisition and storage, the different materiality profiles of digitized and printed books lead to different praxeographies. However, both reading media serve different functions, are accompanied by different reading practices, and complement rather than replace each other. For most readers, it is not a question of displacing the old medium with a new one, but of consciously choosing the more appropriate one in certain reading situations.