Materiality matters

Starting out from the fact that there is a crucial link between the sensory–motor experience of the materiality of the support and the cognitive processing of the text content, the study conducted by Morineau finds that the e-book does not provide the external indicators tomemory in the way that a print book does.

In the e-book, the connection between the text content and the material support is split up, allowing the technological device to display a multitude of content that can be altered with a click. The book, by contrast, is a physicallyand functionally unitary object where the content cannot be distinguished from thematerial part. Hence, they conclude that the e-book ‘does not serve as an unambiguous index to indicate a field of knowledge on the basis of its particular physical form’ (Morineau et al., 2005, p. 346). This is an interesting conclusion in a time when different versions of the e-book (iRex Technologies’ iLiad, or Amazon’s Kindle, for instance) and other mobile technologies (such as mobile phone novels in Japan: see Ito, Okabe &Matsuda, 2005) are again being launched as potentially replacing the print book (both inand out of schools), after their dismal and quite spectacular failure a decade ago. Once again, the question begs itself: will we be reading novels on screen – perhaps on our mobile phones – in the future?

see Anne Mangen

see FrenchTheory