The Digitization of Literary Reading: Contributions from Empirical Research

Abstract

With the growing popularity of e‐readers such as Kindle, literary reading is increasingly digitized. The transition from paper‐based to screen‐based literature invites theoretical and empirical reconsiderations of a number of basic research questions which might at first glance seem trivial: does it make a difference for aspects of the literary reading experience if the text is read on a screen‐based device rather than on paper? Findings from a recent experiment suggest that affordances of surf tablets such asiPad might negatively affect emotional aspects of reading. Referring to empirical research on emotional aspects of literary reading, the article aims to demonstrate the usefulness of more interdisciplinary approaches in studies of the literary reading experience.