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The digital revolution has transformed reading. Onscreen text, audiobooks, podcasts, and videos often replace print. We make these swaps for pleasure reading, but also in schools. How We Read Now offers a ringside seat to the impact of reading medium on learning. Teachers, administrators, librarians, and policy makers need to select classroom materials. College students must weigh their options. And parents face choices for their children. Digital selections are often based on cost or convenience, not educational evidence. Current research offers essential findings about how print and digital reading compare when the aim is learning. Yet the gap between what scholars and the larger public know is huge. How We Read Now closes the gap. The book begins by sizing up the state of reading today, revealing how little reading students have been doing. The heart of the book connects research insights to practical applications. Baron draws on work from international researchers, along with results from her collaborative studies of student reading practices ranging from middle school through college. The result is an impartial view of the evidence, including points on which the jury is still out. The book closes with two challenges. The first is that students increasingly complain print is boring. And second, for all the educational buzz about teaching critical thinking, digital reading is inherently ill suited for cultivating these habits of mind. Since screens and audio are now entrenched—and valuable—platforms for reading, we need to rethink how to help learners use them wisely.

The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities takes a new look at C.P. Snow's distinction between the two cultures, a distinction that provides the driving force for a book that contends that the Internet revolution has sown the seeds for transformative changes in both the sciences and the humanities. It is because of this common situation that the humanities can learn from the sciences, as well as the sciences from the humanities, in matters central to both: generating, evaluating, and communicating knowledge on the Internet. In a succession of chapters, the authors deal with the state of the art in web-based journal articles and books, web sites, peer review, and post-publication review. In the final chapter, they address the obstacles the academy and scientific organizations face in taking full advantage of the Internet: outmoded tenure and promotion procedures, the cost of open access, and restrictive patent and copyright law. They also argue that overcoming these obstacles does not require revolutionary institutional change. In their view, change must be incremental, making use of the powers and prerogatives scientific and academic organizations already have.