Reading from paper versus reading from a touch-based tablet device in proofreading

This paper describes an experiment to evaluate the impact of the use of a touch-based digital reading device in active reading. We compared the performance of proofreading when using paper and when using a touch-based tablet device. Results showed that participants detected more errors when reading from paper than when reading from the tablet device. During reading, when using paper, participants frequently performed the interaction with text, such as pointing to words or sliding their fingers or pens along sentences. This fact suggests that interaction with text plays an important role in proofreading tasks.