Amazon is about to launch its Kindle e-book reader in Oz after a 3 year delay. Kindle holds 1500 books and Amazon’s deal with the phone companies means you can wireless download free any book you buy (books are $10 each). The launch comes along with reports from the US that digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. Readers move between two kinds of bad reading. They suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page without an organized sense of the whole. Or suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blog rolls in the margin let the whole blogosphere in. People read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent. There is also a concern that new young readers who use only digital media will be even more prone to distraction. The current bottom line though is that people who learned to read from books still like books. The ease with which information is distributed on the Web and anyone can ‘write’ an ebook means many are rubbish. On the other hand, the addition of Hyperlinks in ebooks makes them much more useful than plain text. I don’t like reading on PC screens though Kindle is supposed to be easier than most. I am going to reserve judgement until I can see with my own eyes. You can read more (and all the science) about the problems of reading digital media here.