Is Your Kindle Making You Forget What You Read?

Print, screens, and your brain.

Source: Kaboompics

I love everything about physical books. I love libraries. I love bookstores.

The smell of paper and ink gives me a feeling of belonging. I could (and do) spend hours browsing shelves, pulling out a title, and feeling the weight of it in my hands. It’s often the first place I go when I arrive in a new city, right after a yoga studio or a gym.

But for the past decade, my life has been nomadic.

From 2014 to 2025, I moved across three continents, living in eight different countries. With each move, my physical bookshelf couldn’t come with me, and leaving those books behind felt like abandoning old friends.

So, when I finally bought a Kindle in 2020, it was a decision born of practicality, not tech-savviness. Of course, the convenience was undeniable. An entire library in my backpack, a seamless connection to Readwise to review my highlights—what wasn't to love?

And yet, I couldn't shake a nagging feeling. The ideas I consumed on-screen seemed to vanish. I’d finish a chapter and feel a fleeting sense of understanding, only to find the core concepts had evaporated by the next day.

Recently, a reader posed the very question I’d been wrestling with: "What’s actually better for learning, reading on screens or in physical books?"

Not for convenience, but for genuine, durable learning. For comprehension and retention. For the cognitive load our brains can handle, the spatial memory we use to build mental maps, and our susceptibility to distraction and fatigue.

The question sent me digging into the research.

And it turns out that feeling of "vanishing" information isn't just a feeling. It’s a well-documented phenomenon backed by decades of cognitive science. However, the science also reveals a more complex picture, where the best medium depends heavily on the reader, the material, and the goal.

Here’s the science-backed system for understanding why your brain can struggle with screens—and how to strategically combine the best of both print and digital to remember what you read.

The "Screen Inferiority Effect”

The "screen inferiority effect” describes the consistent finding that people often understand and remember less from digital texts compared to print.

A 2018 meta-analysis reviewing 54 studies showed a clear paper-based reading advantage. More recently, a 2024 in-depth eye-tracking study, while small, observed the same pattern, finding that students not only scored lower on-screen but were largely unaware of how differently they were processing the digital text.

But this effect isn't universal. It's most pronounced when reading dense, informational, or expository texts rather than narratives, and particularly when reading under time pressure. For casual reading or simple stories, the difference between paper and screen can shrink or disappear entirely.

So, why does this gap appear, especially during deep learning? It’s not about being "old school." It’s about how the digital medium, by its very nature, can challenge the way our brains are wired to learn.

Here’s what’s happening under the hood:

• 🧠 Your brain gets overloaded. A physical book presents a clean, finite landscape. A screen, however, is an ecosystem of distraction. Even without notifications, the presence of hyperlinks, the option to switch tabs, and the endless scroll create a high extraneous cognitive load. As researcher Ziming Liu notes, digital environments encourage multitasking and non-linear reading, which fragments attention. Your brain isn't just processing the text; it's managing the interface, diverting precious mental resources away from understanding and storing the information.

• 👀 You're trained to skim. The design of the digital world—from social media to news sites—has conditioned us for speed and shallow processing. We scan for keywords and hunt for the gist. Research by Maryanne Wolf, a leading expert on the reading brain, warns that this "shallowing hypothesis" is real; the habit of skimming transfers to more serious content. Instead of engaging in careful, analytical thinking, our brains default to a pattern that's great for browsing but terrible for building lasting knowledge. The 2024 eye-tracking study provided direct evidence, showing students had to re-read on-screen text far more often, suggesting their first pass was much more superficial.

• 🗺️ You lose your "mental map." When you read a physical book, your brain subconsciously builds a spatial map of the text. You recall that a key argument was on the left-hand page, near the top. This physicality—the weight of the pages you've read, the fixed location of words—acts as a memory anchor. On a screen, this "topography" is gone. An endless scroll provides no sense of beginning, middle, or end, leaving the brain without the spatial cues it relies on to structure and recall information.

The Strategic Strengths of Screens

While print holds the high ground for deep comprehension of complex texts, dismissing digital formats entirely would be a mistake. The narrative isn't simply "paper good, screen bad." For certain tasks and readers, digital devices offer distinct, science-backed advantages.

Here’s where screens excel:

• 👓 Accessibility Is a Superpower. The ability to customize font size, spacing, and contrast is a key accessibility feature. For readers with visual impairments or dyslexia, and for many older adults, these features can significantly reduce the cognitive strain of the reading act itself, making digital a more comfortable and less fatiguing medium. Personalized typography can increase reading speed without sacrificing comprehension, acting like "prescription glasses for a digital world."

• 📚 The Infinite, Searchable Library. The practical benefits of e-books are undeniable. Carrying an entire library on one device eliminates physical burdens and provides ubiquitous access to knowledge. Furthermore, the searchability of digital text is a tool for targeted learning. Instead of manually flipping through pages to locate a specific term, a keyword search provides instant access, improving the efficiency of research and review.

• 💡 A Note on E-Readers: Not all screens are created equal. Much of the research on screen inferiority has been done using computers and tablets with backlit LCD screens. Some studies suggest that dedicated e-readers (like a Kindle Paperwhite) using E-Ink technology, which mimics the appearance of paper and reduces glare, may lessen the negative effects on comprehension and visual fatigue.

Getting the Best of Both Worlds

The goal is not to choose between print and digital, but to build a system that leverages the unique strengths of each. This "hybrid" approach is about precision. Here is a science-backed playbook for making your reading targeted, efficient, and durable.

Principle 1: Choose Your Medium by Your Mission

Align your reading tool with your cognitive goal. Not all reading is the same.

• Use Print for Deep Learning & Core Texts. When you must understand, analyze, and retain complex, foundational material, choose print. The physical format’s advantages for sustained focus and building a "mental map" are indispensable for this kind of deep cognitive work.

• Use Digital for Search, Skimming & Supplementary Reading. When your goal is efficiency, convenience, or exploration, choose digital. This is ideal for quickly finding a specific fact, reading supplementary articles, or reviewing notes.

Principle 2: Fight Digital Amnesia with Active Engagement

Passively consuming information is inefficient in any format, but it's a cognitive disaster on a screen. To counteract the "screen inferiority effect," become an active reader.

• Annotate to Anchor Your Thoughts. Writing notes (physical or digital) forces you to grapple with the text. The key is to choose tools that facilitate, rather than hinder, focused interaction.

• Summarize to Solidify Understanding. After reading a section, look away and write down the key arguments in your own words. This practice of retrieval and elaboration is one of the most powerful learning techniques.

• Question Everything to Deepen Analysis. Constantly ask "Why does this matter?" and "How does this connect to what I already know?" This transforms you from a passive recipient into an active participant.

Principle 3: Tame Your Digital Environment

When you read digitally for serious work, you can counter the medium's inherent distractions.

• Create a Digital Sanctuary. Use app and website blockers to create a distraction-free container for your work. (I use Blocksite.) Turn off all notifications. Close irrelevant tabs.

• Work in Focused Sprints. Employ techniques like the Pomodoro Technique—25-minute blocks of intense, single-task focus followed by a 5-minute break. This helps build your "focus muscle.” (I use Be Focused Timer on my Mac).

Become a Medium-Aware Learner

The impact of a medium depends on the text, the task, and you, the reader. A Kindle and a casebook are different tools for different cognitive jobs. One can be a scalpel for precise, quick retrieval; the other is a forge for building deep, durable understanding.

By aligning your medium to your mission, actively engaging with every text, and deliberately taming your digital environment, you move beyond the simplistic "print versus digital" debate. You begin to orchestrate your own learning, empowering your brain to do what it does best: not just consume information, but build lasting knowledge.

Sources

Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., & Salmerón, L. (2018). Don't throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25, 23–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003

Fitzsimmons, G., Weal, M. J., & Drieghe, D. (2019). The impact of hyperlinks on reading text. PloS one, 14(2), e0210900. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210900

Hou, J., Wu, Y., & Harrell, E. (2017). Reading on Paper and Screen among Senior Adults: Cognitive Map and Technophobia. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 2225. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02225

Jensen, R. E., Roe, A., & Blikstad-Balas, M. (2024). The smell of paper or the shine of a screen? Students’ reading comprehension, text processing, and attitudes when reading on paper and screen. Computers & Education, 212, 105107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2024.105107

Krenca, K., Taylor, E., & Deacon, H. (2024). Scrolling and hyperlinks: The effects of two prevalent digital features on children's digital reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12468

Saiju, N., Tamang, N., Tamang, P., & Bastola, P. (2025). A comparative study of e-books and printed books on academic performance: Perception from the university students. International Journal of Humanities Education and Social Sciences, 3(1), 295–311. https://doi.org/10.58578/IJHESS.v3i1.4953