Do You Find That Ebooks Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read? 4-23 Today I read an article related to this issue and it made me think a lot : Do Ebooks make it harder for us to remember the details we've just read? That's an interesting question.Actually I have the same problems as the writer has when I read Ebooks.The author finds that when he/she read novels on the computer,he/she is unable to recall the names of the characters.My problem is similar.After I read 30% or 50% in Ebooks,I can hardly tell what I have just read about and how the material is organized. The writer says that ebooks do make it harder to remember .There is an interesting experiment offered by the author to support his/her idea.In the experiment,students who are unfamiliar with economics are provided with the knowledge of this course.Some use printed books while the others learn on the computer.Although finally students who learn on the computer can perform as good as the others who read on printed books,they seem to digest the material less fully and require more repetition than the printed-book readers during study. To explain why the Ebooks make us forgettable,we should first learn something about how we store information and recall things. When we recall something.,it's "remembering" if we conciously recall the information in the context,and it's "knowing" if we just cue ourselves with associations like the location of the relevant information in the book .The spatial landmarks seem irrelevent,but they are helpful because human beings' brain mechanisms for information storage can fuction well with their help. Obviously,Ebooks have a lot of disadvantages.They cannot offer us a sence of "how far along in the book we are" ,and"where we are right now".That's because during our reading,they only show us the precentage already read ,instead of page numbers(location cues can help memory)；to return to an important point,we search by typing or flipping back quickly,instead of faning one or two pages slowly and glancing the whole pages carefully,so we cannot cement short-term memory by thus reviewing and build connection across the whole book.What's more,the scope provided by an Ebook ,which is limited by the screen of the computer or telephone,is much smaller than the books,so one complete part is divided into several pieces,so is our undertanding of the specific point.