The European Commission is funding a new study to understand reading comprehension when it comes to reading digital content, such as e-Books. It starts next week and will be ongoing until until 2017. This is poised to be the most comprehensive research report ever attempted.
The research is being conducted by EU READ, which is a consortium of European reading promotion organisations. The members who belong to the organization makeup scientific and research institutions located in Belgium, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria,Portugal, Stavanger, and Norway.
EU Read is basically just a collective body of people who want to understand, on a fundamental level, how digital reading influences cognition and retention. This warrants a strong scientific body who can run tests on students and then liaison with publishers for their own data and to conduct broad studies.
Likely it won’t be until 2018 before we start to see data start coming from this massive study. Publishers all over the world are going to be interested in their findings because it could have reverberating effects on everything from the way e-book reading apps are constructed to the actual e-book format itself.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.