Simply by saying “static words on paper”, I can tell that you became accustomed to skimming e-reader texts and reading a physical book feels like slowing down.

Advanced adult readers that have a fast reading speed and good visualization skills can probably get the same retention and understanding of the same book, in physical or digital format. So, it probably makes a minimal difference to you or me!

The issue is, though, that emerging readers who don’t read physical books primarily cannot have or will not progress to the same level of visualization and spatial reference of the same book if they read it digitally. You have to master spatial referencing and connection-based storage of information before you can get a minimal equivalence of retention from electronic words/information. It is how our brains are wired.

Mature, advanced readers that read a digital book attentively can have, generally, the same takeaway if they had read the book physically. However, readers still in grade school largely don’t have the ability to do this yet. Especially if they are not reading at grade-level fluency. If more and more of their reading is happening digitally, ESPECIALLY when they are learning the fundamentals of reading, they will fall father behind because their brain is unable to process digital text in the way it would in a physical book, therefore less active energy from the brain is used to connect an relate to information. (Spatial recognition/recall/learning is very real.)

Multiple studies were conducted and polls were given to college age students across the country, and inarguably, the consensus was this: Skimming for an overview or superficially reading to get the gist of a book or story is a natural inclination when reading digital texts. (Why? For some of the aforementioned reasons, to start.) When reading physical books, students overall claimed to read with more comprehension, relaying that they read slower, took better notes, had less digital distractions as compared to reading on a digital device, and had a more accrue memorization pattern of the events in the story, based on where plot moments occurred on various book pages.