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Ball State students, in an experiment, found e-books harder to use than paper. But their grades didn’t suffer meaningfully. So says an article in the August 26 Chronicle of Higher Education, paraphrasing a report on the BSU study.

The TeleRead take: A useful study. Still, keep in mind that the students used Gemstar hardware, which is not the be-all and end-all. Future screens will be sharper, and highlighting and other features will be easier to use. What’s more, as noted, even with these limitations, academic performance didn’t suffer on a test comparing e-book users with those of paper textbooks. “The textbook users earned an average of 29 points per quiz,” the Chronicle reported, “while the black-and-white and color e-book users earned average scores of 28.9 and 28.5, respectively.” The difference would be too small to be significant.

(Via eBook Web.)

 
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