[Books on Screen].

Abstract

With e‑readers, smartphones, notebooks, and tablets, new reading media have emerged whose haptics, spatiality, visuality, and materiality differ fundamentally from those of the traditional book. Electronic reading devices are characterized by a range of different text representations and distinct associated reading practices. This article will address the question of the concrete practices of literary reading on screens and the specific literary reading experiences on the basis of a laboratory experiment (N=207), a focus group study (N=34), and a quota-based online survey (N=779). The synoptic evaluation of these three published studies shows that a praxeological perspective in particular can yield important insights for understanding the differences between reading printed books and e‑books. The different material conditions of digitized and printed books result in different practices, both in terms of the quantity of what is read and the choice of text, the reading locations and reading situations, and the forms of acquisition and storage. However, both reading media fulfill different functions, go hand in hand with different reading practices, and complement rather than replace each other.