An analytical summary of

A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-line Documents

by Kenton O’Hara and Abigail Sellen,
and a fast-forward to the age of e-paper.
Victor Diacono

Introduction
In Writing Space[1] Jay David Bolter hails the computer as the fourth great document
medium to join the pantheon of media that revolutionised the dissemination of
information. But will e-paper become the next medium to join these ranks once it
materializes, like paper as we know it today, as a mass commodity costing next to
nothing and in a weightless and malleable form?
In this article, I primarily offer an analysis of ‘A Comparison of Reading Paper and
On-line Documents’, a study conducted by Kenton O’Hara and Abigail Sellen at the
Rank Xerox EuroPARC in 1997. The final part of my paper is a fast-forward to the early
years of the 21st Century when e-paper, first developed in the 1970s by Nick Sheridan
(also at Xerox), has become a reality waiting to achieve mass commodity status.
Why and how does e-paper come into an analysis of the behavioural traits
knowledge workers employ in the usage of conventional paper and online documents?
To start with, because e-paper will emulate the tactility of conventional paper once it
achieves a malleable form and shall at the very least become a parallel or
complementary commodity, entitling it to the behavioural insight O’Hara and Sellen
observe in their subjects’ usage of ordinary paper. But, more critically, because I
believe that with time e-paper will not only largely displace ordinary paper where it is
employed in volume, but will also supplant the computer screen as the favoured and
most inexpensive medium for digital reading in all applications, the office primarily.

O’Hara’s and Sellen’s study: the background

O’Hara and Sellen employ a broadly descriptive approach in demonstrating the value
of contrasting paper and online media, when researching the design of superior
interfaces for the reading of digital documents. Their stated aim is to unravel the
complexity of the design challenge, enabling predictions over when and if a paperless
future is to be expected.
The authors present a number of findings from two research models, paper-based
and online, for insight into the development of better reading and annotation
technologies and for prediction of whether Lancaster’s[2] “paperless society in the not
too distant future” will materialise. O’Hara and Sellen take ‘a broadly descriptive
approach’ in preference to sole focus on measurement. This statement sets the tone
for the rest of the study where measurement does not seem to be afforded particular
scientific rigour.
O’Hara and Sellen also question other researchers’ methodologies and acknowledge
that even their study is not set on rigid empirical lines. They state that whereas “the
majority of studies focus on outcome measures of reading such as speed… a lesser
effort has been devoted to looking at process differences [such as] eye movements”.
The study laments a historical failure at identifying major differences between
online and paper reading and cites, as a cause, insensitivity to the measures
employed. The authors quote Dillon[3] blaming the ‘distorted view’ ergonomists have of
reading, and their penchant to apply too many variables to an innately intuitive task.
To make a mundane analogy, how many variables can be set to the task of handling
cutlery and other objects at table given that, once imbibed, this becomes a highly
intuitive skill? The authors nonetheless hold that design lessons can be methodically
extracted from this corpus in spite of its historical shortcomings.

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 O’Hara and Sellen quote T. Plume[4] in stating that in spite of predictions that
current digital alternatives to paper and improved screen technologies will lead to
paper’s obsolescence, paper “is still the most popular method of communications and
is likely to remain so”. However, this study was conducted over a decade ago and
screen technology has since advanced in leaps and bounds, and mobile computing
media has grown thinner, lighter and smaller. Their subject thus has to be credited in
the light of where reading media stood then and one is led to ask, just fourteen years
later, whether reading off computer screens will become preferable to paper-based
reading now that technological advance has led to the handheld, light and wafer-thin
screens in e-book readers such as the iLiad, Kindle and Nook.

The methodology
Whereas reading serves different purposes such as skimming, scanning,
comprehension or reflection, the study adopts summarisation as its task for two
reasons. First, for the strong demands it places on the document presentation medium
and secondly because of its affinity to the technique adopted by knowledge workers.
The authors opted for a typical workstation running a widespread word-processing
application in favour of a ‘best configuration’. They deemed a ‘best scenario’ to be both
subjective and non-representative of the average environment. This course of action is
however debatable as one can argue that investigation should be based on an optimal
computer configuration as the price of cutting-edge technology typically comes down
to affordable levels in the very short term.
Test conditions have been kept like-with-like across both models. Subjects, five to
each group, were instructed to produce a two- to three-hundred word summary and
left free to mark and annotate the article as they wished. Sessions were video-
recorded for the subsequent elicitation of comments from the subjects on their own
behaviour.
However, the authors fail to consider the benefits an automated word count would
have afforded the subjects of the on-line model. And a second issue effecting
outcomes was the picking of five subjects for each group. The ‘statistical power’ of a
complement of ten or more produces exponentially wider and more representative
ratios for behavioural patterns, and allays concerns over sampling bias.

Selected findings
O’Hara and Sellen only present what they consider the most important findings, those
deemed as possessing significant design implications. One is however led to ask, are
not all observations relevant to design if paper-associated behavioural patterns are to
be simulated? This truncation possibly dents the study’s comprehensiveness as
establishing ‘the most important’ evidently constitutes a subjective act.
The study contrasts online and paper-based models but no consideration has been
given to the possibility of a third ‘mixed’ model integrating online reading with paper-
based annotation. The authors might argue that a mixed media model is dilutive of a
clear comparison between two models at divergent poles. Yet, the mixed approach
would have afforded a third distinct category of behavioural insights for design
purposes, and clear comparison between the paper and online media would have been
preserved nonetheless.
To summarise, O’Hara and Sellen identify two major differences between paper and
online media. The first concerns the smooth interleaving of paper-based annotation
with reading (under the online condition, note-taking had to be done either from
memory after completion of reading or by means of unwieldy editing of pasted chunks
of text). The second chief difference they identify is that paper supported annotation
as a distinct markup layer which did not modify the source document. This latter

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distinction is however debatable given that online marking can be applied to a copy of
the original digital document.
The study’s detailed findings, structured upon the acts of annotation, extra-
boundary navigation and spatial layout, appear below. My comments have occasionally
been added to the authors’ observations.

Annotation on paper
Annotation and note-taking deepened comprehension and helped in the forming of a
writing plan under both the online and paper-based reading models.
Four of five subjects employed note-taking which they intuitively interwove with
reading. Moreover, two of them directly annotated the source document through
idiosyncratic markings, an observation of high relevance to design.
This two-of-five found personalized marking of the source helpful in the extraction of
textual structure upon re-reading; the remaining three held that note-taking on a
separate sheet was conducive to the restructuring and collation of information from
diverse locations.
One subject considered this form of note-taking a potential “pool of text and ideas
that I can dip into to write real sentences”, a form which may perhaps be described as
the modus operandi of the more disciplined and thorough reader.
Subjects’ notes were also found to be in outline form, shortened and jotted down so
as not to stunt the reading momentum, and modified iteratively. With e-paper, the best
design option emulating this manual mode would appear to be a stylus-and-software
solution to transfer the marked-up document onto digital storage.
All other observations apart, the principal attribute to note-taking on paper was
found to be its smooth integration with reading, into one interwoven and holistic process
that comes intuitively to the literate.

Annotation online
Four of five subjects stated that they would have employed annotation had the
document been paper-based, thereby appearing to make a strong case against online
reading and summarisation at least insofar as the technology stood in 1997.
All subjects indicated the need of annotation as a second independent layer distinct
from the source text for two reasons: to preserve the original text and because it was
held supportive of quick re-reading.
Three of five attempted note-taking through the copy/pasting of relevant text. One
of them however remarked that this was fundamentally different to coherent manual
note-taking as the pasted text required extensive editing. From my experience, I have
found this technique convenient but much depends on the length and depth of the
source material as the technique does not lend itself to reflection. The act can otherwise
deteriorate into a mechanical act of selective duplication bereft of the mental absorption
that is a by-product of manual note-taking.
The remaining two subjects took most of their notes entirely from memory after
reading the whole document. However, the study does not delve into memory retention
levels and one consequently fears this technique could amount to a hit-and-miss
approach to any but the shortest of documents.
I would personally find online annotation too distractive and time-consuming
although the occasional copy/paste and re-edit does the job when it is a matter of
rehashing a short document into clearer structure or terms. Moreover, with annotation
on paper I do not see much relevance to the subjects’ emphasis on preservation of the
source document, unless it is particularly voluminous, as there will generally be a copier
at hand at the workplace to produce duplicates for reading and annotation purposes. The
annotation techniques in O’Hara’s and Sellen’s study consequently depend to a
significant extent on the nature and volume of the source document as well as on
desired output.
In the absence of digitally-embedded conventional paper (see Fast-forward to e-
paper further down), I would still keep a jotting pad at hand for tactile reassurance and
for its affordances in settling one’s focus and unconsciously marking milestones. This
need for tactile reassurance or reinforcement can possibly be a lifetime legacy for those

3
not having used digital media from the earliest days of literacy, even for those of us who
have been at keyboards for three decades.

Extra-boundary navigation
Under both paper and online conditions, moving through documents served the
functions of planning, referencing and understanding.
• Planning served the need of making connections between different parts of the text, to
develop a structure.
• Referencing supported scanning for checking on facts.
• Checking aided understanding, clarification or confirmation.
In the paper model, navigation through documents was characterised by its innate
speed and intuitiveness. The use of both hands, complemented by paper’s tangible
nature, enabled interleaving of activity while handling the medium. Physical cues such as
document thickness also provided clues to inter-document location, and fixity of
information aided fast location of any particular chunk of text.
Under the online condition, navigation was found cumbersome when scrolling or
paging, particularly in the rendering of images. Another drawback was onscreen content
not moving concurrently with dragging or paging motion. Yet another weakness was that
onscreen spatial constraints interfered with the flexibility and speed of extra-document
navigation.
Another identified drawback was that online searching for information did not enjoy
the benefits of the information fixity supported by paper except where images appear in
the vicinity. However, online is found to have an edge over paper in that a search can be
run on phrases from incidental memory.
I would draw some qualification in that navigational drawbacks associated with
rendering have receded since 1997. The typical RAM storage size was 128 megabytes
then and it is in the region of two gigabytes in 2010; an Intel Pentium II processor
employed 233 MHz of power in ’97 and a Core i5 operates at 3 GHz today[5].
From O’Hara’s and Sellen’s observations, online navigation appears to emerge as a
third and intrusive task in addition to reading and writing. Alternatively, hands-driven
navigation between paper documents is intuitive and a wholly unobtrusive activity. While
an online document is perceived by the reader as a scroll the end of which cannot be
readily visualized, books or paper documents have a virtual bottom right-hand marker to
every page which serves both as an unobtrusive milestone and as an aid for
reinforcement.
To recapitulate, the reviewed study found navigation through documents essential
for reference, and for the organization and checking of information. The media however
differed in critical ways:
• Navigation through paper was quick, instinctive and interwove easily with reading;
online navigation proved slow and laborious, thus detracting from the reflection
naturally associated with reading from paper.
• Two-handed movement was instinctive with paper but interrupted the free flow of
activity in the online model.
• Onscreen documentation lacked navigational support such as the evaluation of
document length.
• Fixity of information was supportive of incidental memory with the paper model, but
was undermined in the online model by lack of a full-page view (even if images did
serve as anchors in the latter condition).

Spatial layout
In spatial layout, critical differences have been identified between both media and the
authors deemed them important for three considerations:
• The need of laying out pages in a way forming a mental overview of the source
document.
• Adjacent laying-out of pages to relate or check on specific snippets of information.
• Juxtaposition of the source with the summary in progress, for the interleaving of
writing with reading.

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 With paper, individual pages can be laid out in space and in proximity to each other.
This arrangement was dynamic in that pages could be moved into and out of focus
within a compact space to facilitate shifting of attention.
There are constraints to the online model with the restricted visual field a screen
offers. Moreover, screen resolution in that age was not easily readable even in two-page
view mode, although resolution today poses a much lesser problem.
Visual field restrictions also hindered quick intra-document cross-referencing which
was only achievable through the resizing and overlapping of windows, with attendant
loss of concentration. Moreover, the subject also had to give some thought as to which
online documents to display, to the extent that even the documents’ foreground and
background status was a constraint on concurrent reading and writing. Readers’
comprehension levels diminished as a direct consequence of increased mental workload
and distraction.
To summarise, laying pages out in space was found vital to obtaining a sense of
structure for extra-documentary referencing or for the integration of reading and
writing. Three principal differences were identified between the two models.
• Paper lain out in space allowed for visualization of large amounts of information, thus
providing a holding space for quick referencing between documents.
• Paper layout was dynamic and flexible allowing for quick cross-referencing and
juxtaposition of documents; repositioning and resizing of online windows required
some thought and advance planning.
• Whereas online integration of reading and writing proved problematic, paper
supported the concurrent and independently-manipulated utilization of reading and
writing spaces.

O’Hara and Sellen opine that annotation is vital to comprehension and as a

planning aide. Given the dearth of practical online annotation techniques, this
essentially confirms online reading to be a poor substitute to paper.

Design implications
Online software tools offer valuable benefits such as the re-use of information, easy
modification of text, spell-checkers, a word count function and a thesaurus. Paper
benefits, however, far outweigh them in their core function of reading and reading-
and-writing as paper supports annotation, quick navigation and spatial flexibility.
In design terms, the authors opine that rather than supplanting paper one could
develop scanning technologies to ease the transition of paper-based information into
the digital realm. They hold that while paper is likely to remain the optimal reading
medium, one can still look at it’s usage for design enhancements in digital reading
technology. This is an area of research right up the street of Xerox, the paper’s
sponsor, which produces the Kurzweil Reading Machine (developed in 1976 by Kurzweil
Technologies) for the scanning of print in any font.
The study did not find online tools to be supportive of a seamless integration of
note-taking, with lack of free-text annotation a principal problem. It is thus imperative
that input techniques maximizing richness and variation of marking, through use of
texture and colour, are developed. Moreover, a paramount consideration was that
online markings are kept on a layer strictly distinct from the source document, for its
preservation. Digital technology did however offer the ability, even in 1997, of
choosing whether markings are to be temporary or kept permanently.
Improvement in computer systems’ response times, touched on earlier, will
support quicker online navigation while multiple-input technology will spawn a new
range of navigational techniques supporting concurrent activity. One design concept is
the equation of navigation with touch input and that of production of markings with the
stylus.
One can also envisage other feedback modes such as audio or tactile cues on
where one lies within a document. Perspective and stereoscopic displays even offer a
third dimension to the representation of features, such as document thickness.

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Emphasis on endemic reference points, such as page corners and edges, would be
another useful concept in information search.
The study points out many benefits to a larger screen size for quick access to
documents but this still does not address the flexibility required in terms of the
positioning of multiple documents. Creation of a virtual space such as the Unix
operating system’s fvwm is touted whereby documents are moved through a separate
miniaturized overview pane, although still within a spatial continuum, a design concept
since adopted in Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system.
Constraints also arise from non-flexibility in document arrangement within the
available space, such as the inability to lay any two pages side by side. Other
limitations concern the inability of making virtual document piles and of placing
documents and pages at angles to each other. However, virtual space has since been
extended through 24-inch monitors and operating systems now support Dual Monitor
systems, thereby almost trebling the virtual space available on a typical 1997 monitor.
Futuristic prototypes such as Sun Microsystems’ 1993 Starfire[6] even tout a part-flat,
part-projected workspace.
O’Hara and Sellen promote portable, wireless displays as a physical embodiment of
documents and as a way of increasing online spatial flexibility. The necessary
technological breakthrough has since arrived in the form of plastic electronics enabling
the advent of the roll-up computer screen and of flat sheets in any size[7]. However,
insofar as reading and processing of documents is concerned, research into e-paper
extends far beyond this early concept in terms of practicality and unobtrusiveness.
When it finally arrives in mass-marketable form, it will be much lighter, thinner,
minimally priced and thus available in quantity, thereby fully emulating the benefits of
conventional paper.

Fast-forward to e-paper
The advent of the paperless office has been touted by many, yet computer
applications, and especially the World Wide Web, have driven up the volume of
printing done. Sellen, together with Richard Harper, estimates in The Myth of the
Paperless Office[8] that the e-mail by itself has increased office paper consumption by
forty percent.
The principal culprits in this catch are possibly the World Wide Web itself with the
plethora of information it puts at our disposal and the very behavioural activity
O’Hara’s and Sellen’s study documents. This latter activity can often arise from
redundancy inherent in the retrieved information, prompting sieving, summarisation
and editing as we quite often have to alternate between online reading and paper-
based annotation for purposes of filtering and condensation.
At the root of Sellen and Harper's analysis lies the notion of ‘affordance’, a moniker
for the attributes an object makes available (or affords). This notion allows the authors
to contrast the affordances of paper with those of digital devices seeking to emulate its
purpose. They explore systems and devices possessing the potential of emulating or
supporting current paper activities, and they submit that the future lies in arriving at a
symbiosis of paper and electronic document tools rather than the pursuance of the
holy grail of a paperless office.
It is not hard following Sellen’s and Harper’s rationale. However, this does not
preclude envisioning a new paper commodity retaining all the legacy attributes of
thinness, lightness, porousness, opacity and flexibility while hosting embedded digital
attributes. And once this revolutionary digital commodity reaches the tactility of
conventional paper and can be folded as easily, it will have attained not only the digital
affordance necessary to supplant the computer screen but also the ergonomic and
physical attributes to largely relegate conventional paper to low-volume home usage
once cost has descended to the level of conventional paper.

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 Research is already happening in this direction, with the embedding of organic
transistors into conventional paper. An organic electronic paper display technology[9]
has been presented where electrochromic display cells and electrochemical transistors
(produced from smart pixels used in matrix displays) have been applied to coated
cellulose-based paper by means of printing techniques. Not only is digital affordance
being introduced but it is being embedded onto the legacy medium with its innate
benefits of ergonomic affordances and low cost. Why reinvent the medium when its
legacy version can be taken on board?
The New Scientist, in an article entitled ‘Paper transistors make for disposable
electronics’ [10] claims that “paper transistors could end the hunt for alternatives to
silicon chips and herald the introduction of electronic devices cheap and bendy enough
to use on disposable food cans.” Such a development puts paid, at least for reading
applications, even to plastic electronics (the speed and advance of concurrently
developed and rival technology is such that innovation can fall into obsolescence
before it reaches fruition). With paper transistor devices already that flexible, it will not
take a momentous leap of innovation to make them as foldable as conventional paper.
Moreover, if they are cheap enough to use on disposable food cans, they cannot be
very far from reaching the low cost levels of simple paper.
It may not be a paperless office that the future holds in store after all but the
paper office with a revolutionized medium. This short review has however only looked
at e-paper for reading, and the medium will first have to emulate its twin legacy
function of writing before it can aspire to supplant its forebear. While research has
principally been directed at e-paper for reading and display, e-writing has taken its
first steps with rigid tablet-based e-writing devices such as the Neoslate e-Paper
Writing Tablet[11] lined up for market release in the second quarter of 2011.
The level of OCR handwriting recognition quality will always be a critical
consideration in such devices. The ground-breaking leap of technology here will arrive
when the hardware makes way for ‘paperware’ hosting the required digital
affordances, embedded at the paper-production stage. In other words, the technology
will have to be developed for writing on digitally-embedded conventional paper to be
electronically readable by digital hardware. This also implies development of suitable
interfaces to transfer handwriting from e-paper to computer such as a new generation
of physically unobtrusive scanners[12] or, possibly, visible hotspots embedded onto
paper, onto which a small interfacing device can be clipped. As Vannevar Bush[13]
observed as far back as 1945, “the world has arrived at an age of cheap complex
devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”
The advent of writable e-paper carrying all the legacy affordances associated with
conventional paper is still some way off. But arrive it will and, by that time,
eMagazines[14] and e-paper books[15] will have become an established medium and the
paper metaphor will be complete… a read-only e-paper medium for the ‘printed word’
living alongside writable, machine-readable and disposable e-paper.

In conclusion
Andrew Dillon[16] identifies two schools of thought with Ken Garland’s[17] holding that
computer screens will never supplant paper and eulogising over the book’s
“reassuring, feel-the-weight, take-your-own-time kind of thing”. A second school
championed by Ted Nelson[18] believes technology will inevitably catch up with modern
paper… “The question is not can we do everything on screens, but when will we, how
will we, and how can we make it great?”
‘Making it great’ may lie in the eventual refinement of e-paper into a mass
commodity possessing additional layers of digital attributes over old paper benefits.
Visualisation of this new revolutionary commodity also opens up the way to
conceptualizing the monitor as a sheet of e-paper moved around the work surface,

7
once the prevalent poor refresh rates have been sufficiently improved, or clipped to a
copy-holder facing the writer. Add a virtual keyboard to this setup and we gain full
restitution of the traditional desk space we enjoyed before the advent of the popular
microcomputer three decades ago.
Some day soon Garland’s belief that screens can never supplant paper might turn
out to be prophetic in an ironic way, as e-paper seems set to supplant not only its
conventional counterpart but the computer screen too.

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