Page Navigation on Paper Books and Electronic Media in Reading to Answer Questions

This paper describes experiments comparing reading performance such as reading speed and the accuracy of tasks in reading to answer questions using different media: paper books, a desktop PC, and a tablet PC. As typical examples of reading of this kind, we considered two scenarios: searching answers from text manuals and searching given photographs from photo books. In two experiments conducted according to the two scenarios, participants performed tasks most quickly using a paper book or a PC. They had trouble flipping through pages with a tablet PC. Although the paper book was inferior to the PC in terms of turning over pages continuously with rapidity, participants performed flexible navigation with the paper book such as starting the navigation from various positions of the book and jumping to the target position straight away without hesitating skipping over the target. Based on these results, we provide suggestions to improve a page navigation feature in electronic media.