Selecting books: a performance-based study

Our research compares the impact of paper vs. electronic presentation of text on the book selection process. Our focus is on the stage of book selection in which users study the content of a book to decide whether it is useful for their intended purpose. Effectiveness is operationalized as accurate determination of whether a non-fiction book contains enough discussion of a particular topic to be useful for a research paper. 24 undergraduates participated in a balanced study in which they were given a topic-book pair and asked to decide whether the book was useful for the topic. We explore the differences in performance, with specific reference to the role of the search function, table-of-contents and index