ABSTRACT
The ways in which we read are currently being reshaped by digitalisation, with print textbooks and paper notebooks being replaced by computers, tablets, e-readers, and smartphones. Given that digital technologies make possible different affordances for engagement than paper, we need to understand the role of the material affordances of the media, or artefacts, in reading. Applying perspectives from 4E and distributed cognition, this chapter explains how reading is an embodied, multisensory engagement with a text. A combined 4E and distributed cognition approach invites us to study reading as a temporally extended and whole-bodied material engagement and to explore it in relation to a person’s lived history. This approach entails paying attention to how different readers engage with different kinds of materials and how this engagement depends on both the material substrate of the text and also who the reader is.
