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"In digital, we can link in different media, images, sound, and other text, and people can get overwhelmed," explains Andrew Dillon, a professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin, "These are disruptive activities that can carry a cost in terms of attention."

The way the article is presented gives an unintentional (?) perfect example. Using big gifs dividing the text and serving no other purpose then stop me from reading the whole article... And there are moving ads as well.

Point well made ;-)

Ironically, I skimmed through this, looking for a key sentence in every paragraph. Didn't find much of value.

People need to learn to condense their point, ideally down to one small paragraph or sentence. For instance,

"Without any data to back it up, I have a suspicion that people's reading skills are suffering because they are used to being flooded with writing in the digital world, and so they don't read everything from top to bottom."

I have another opinion, which is this:

People are now reading more than ever (and writing). Thirty years ago, the same types of people wouldn't be reading anything at all, and spend several hours a day in front of a TV. And they wouldn't be writing text messages, but rather using the telephone.

The reason people are non-linearly scanning text is not because they are managing their time poorly. They are managing their time well in the face of poorly organized, information-sparse rambling.

Most writing out there competing for your attention doesn't deserve it, and in writing that does deserve your attention, there are actually only small "hot spots" which do, not everything.

Non-linear reading isn't a degradation in reading skill; it is a valuable skill in it own right. Schools even teach this to kids: how to skim through text to get the gist of the content so that you can focus on what is relevant. (And they taught this before the "digital age".) You need this skill to get through university. When you're doing research, there are just too many books and papers to sit there going word by word.

So, skim on, friends! And raise a big TL;DR middle finger to ramblers (like what I'm becoming here with this comment).

You need one more skill: You need to know when skimming didn't give you enough.

I see this with my kids. One of them skimmed the chapter in the math book, then asked me for help with the exercises. My "help" was: "Go back and actually read the chapter. Don't skim it." And that worked.

It can be hard to tell the difference between "there's nothing there worth my time" and "there's something there, and I have to read it more thoroughly to find out what it is." You don't get 100% accuracy at this, but you can (I think) get somewhat good at it.

You can still trim how much you read when doing chapter exercises. Just start with the exercises and then search backwards for clues when you're stuck on something. Some books have a "chapter summary" which serves as a kind of directory to the details. That is conveniently located between the exercises and the bulk of the chapter: it practically begs to be traversed in that direction. :)
Most writing out there competing for your attention doesn't deserve it, and in writing that does deserve your attention, there are actually only small "hot spots" which do, not everything.

I don't know if digital reading is shrinking my reading attention span, but "long form journalism" sure is. The utility of the journalism in day to day life is already quite low, and the utility is usually correlated with boring and dry. Reading articles written by people who think so highly of their storytelling to waste my time by padding it out made me realize I don't give a fuck. Now I can't help but notice regular news is padded out as well. There is still room in my heart for in depth reporting, but "long form" is a trick to be engaging, just like clickbait but with a fake air of importance.

I find myself particularly turned off by lengthy introductory paragraphs that begin with some useless generality, anecdote and such: stuff that might be effective in public speaking or writing essays. I know that connecting the material to the real world somehow is important: to provide a bridge to the subject matter which makes it relevant to the readers. But at the same time, I recognize the device and it's just irksome. I've already somehow decided that I'm interested, and landed on the page already; you don't have to waste words convincing me.

Petty Woman [1990 movie] quote sums it up: I appreciate this whole seduction thing you've got going on here, but let me give you a tip: I'm a sure thing.

:)

A couple of anecdotes, for what they're worth.

- I find that if I only consume digital media, over time my ability to deep-dive into complex works of fiction or non-fiction diminishes. My attention span gets very short. I want to "pop off" and go consume something else. It takes a dedicated bit of effort to switch back into real reading mode

- From looking at my server logs, the average web consumer doesn't get 99% of whatever you put on the page. People used to say you should design your page so that somebody driving by in a car could read and understand it. I would go so far as to design it so that a drunken one-eyed near-sighted person who is in an argument with their SO could read and understand it while going by at 100 mph. The numbers are not pretty.

- Multi-purpose devices have but one goal: to get you to consume more material. The vendors that make them do not care whether you read that new downloaded book for 5 minutes or 5 hours. They only care that you downloaded it. Books on the other hand? People who make those want you to consume one particular work and then share/talk about it. With a book, you and the author are in this thing together. With a multi-media reader, you're just a demographic

Those graphic animations make it absolutely impossible for me to read the article. Must have been done by effing greenhorns. Professionals should know better.
At least it doesn't have the infuriating widget that pops up a sodding share button whenever I highlight text (which I do perpetually whilst reading), thereby blocking the thing I'm trying to read.
I found it somewhat ironic, trying to read the article, "But this style of reading may come at a cost—Liu noted in his study that sustained attention seems to decline when people read onscreen rather than on paper" while motion in my peripheral vision worked to pull my attention away.
Perhaps it's done intentionally? You're reading an article that's telling you that digital screen reading leaves the user prone to distractions. If they litter their page with distractions, the user can say, "Yeah, I felt distracted while reading this very article! Maybe there is something to this!"

Probably not, but you never know.

Maybe they wanted to know what a self-fulfilling prophecy feels like.
I don't know. Cynic in me thinks that this may be in fact work of professionals, who don't have time to care about irrelevant things such as quality, that do not affect the bottomline.
But it does affect the bottom line, I think. I was on that page for maybe 5 seconds. Even if I had had time to click an ad, I was certainly not in the mood. If you torture your users like that, they will just run away (and not come back).

This thing (and several other “creative” contemporary blogs) reminds me of the blinking web pages from the 1990s.

It's much easier to skim a newspaper than even the best feed reader, IMO, so it's not like that style of reading is new. I suppose the big difference now is the proportion of time spent on skimming media like newspapers vs long form media.
I agree that the biggest difference is that the web simply has people spending more time reading skim-worthy content. News/blog articles, forums, and comment threads make up a significant part of online reading and are naturally much more skim-able than most books. That's not a bad thing.

The important question is whether, as our deeper reading also goes digital, our habits of skimming while online will extend to them or not. Habits can be hard to break.

I find font size and environment a big thing. Everything I read on a website is from a desk based environment, from home or at work.

Every book I currently read is on the same laptop, but I sit at the back of a bus, with the PDF font size blown up to 10 words per line, where I can lose myself without other distractions. I convert every ePub and the like to a PDF with the formatting I like.

From the article:

>Liu noted in his study that sustained attention seems to decline when people read onscreen rather than on paper, and that people also spend less time on in-depth reading.

Sit at the back of bus. No attention towards anywhere else.

> The researchers found that when people read short nonfiction onscreen, their understanding of the text suffered because people managed their time poorly compared with when they used paper (although paper’s advantage disappeared when people were given a fixed amount of time to read the text).

Manage time. Sit at the back of a bus to read, instead of standing on the subway despite some time saving.

> Other studies have also found costs when people multi-task online

Again, sit at the back of a bus. No online.

Perhaps the public busses where I live are really nice. Actually, they are, albeit overcrowded at intermediate stops. I intentionally take a slower route home to have time sitting on the back of the bus to read.

Pumped up font sizes, a touchscreen laptop, and a seat at the back of a bus are great reading environments. Far better than sitting at home with all the distractions that makes.

An anecdote: I much prefer pumped up font sizes on an 11" screen than typical typeset in a handily carried book. And cannot concentrate when trying to read on a 6" or 7" phone/small tablet screen.

I found the article largely unreadable due to all the movement from the animations. Did the author want to show how bad he can design the screen reading experience?
Seems like this article makes quite a leap from the study results to their suggestion that everyone reads paper books. Study results:

1. People reading on a screen are more likely to skim

2. Skimming reduces comprehension of the material

3. Reading on paper correlates with better reconstruction of plot

It seems like 1 and 2 taken together are as good an explanation as any for 3. Given that, I feel like it would be at least worth an experiment to see if making a conscious effort to avoid skimming would be just as effective as switching to reading on paper. If so, I think that would be a cheaper and easier solution to the issue.

When I was younger and reading on the web, (the days of 28k modems) I didn't skim as much as a do now. I would put this to my inexperience of reading then (thinking that everything needed to be read). And that now there is a lot of crap on the internet. Its hard to sort out the good stuff that deserves attention. So i skim a lot.

But paper books are king. I tend to move slower through the text and have a more enjoyable time of it.

I agree that we consume more information, probably way too much, but in my experience, attention to detail and deep comprehension of the material depends more on how interested in the topic you are.

If I am actually trying to learn something or if I like a story, I'll become extremely focused on it no matter the medium (even the small smartphone screens that I usually hate are fine).

But if I'm reading for the sake of reading or to update my knowledge of a topic or stay up to date with the news, then I'll skim like crazy...

The conclusions of this article closely mirror my own experience. I generally prefer reading a physical book because I am much more likely to remember the contents afterward. Things I read on a screen somehow feel slippery and less valuable.

But, how do we reconcile this with the transforming publishing industry? Will they only publish text books and prose that requires "deep reading" and leave everything else to be digitized?

While the difference between skimming and thorough reading is obvious, I think the finding at the bottom has some merit. Thinking back on books I've read on print vs ones I've only read on screens, I can certainly remember the chronology of paper books better. Perhaps that is due to the physicality of pages gradually accumulating on the left side.

I feel like this has some definite implications for UI design - is blankness with text really the best way to convey an ebook?

Reader View mode on FF, or any other addon/bookmarklet, works great when I really want to focus on an article.