Reading from screen: Theoretical and empirical background

This research aims to deliver the fundamental, theoretical and empirical background surrounding electronic reading. It is structured into five sections starting with a reading definition, reading process, and a comparison between reading from paper and from an electronic format. The fourth section discusses the variables that influence reading electronic texts. These variables are classified into three categories: the individual or user variables (age, gender, experience and educational level); the text layout variables (font type and size, line length, spaces between lines of text, colour); and the applied technology (hardware and software). In the fifth section, a summary of previous studies is given and a framework for these variables is suggested based on the previous surveys.