In light of the written word
On e-ink, The Onion, and the almost insurmountable advantage physical print will always have in a head-to-head competition with print on a screen
A headline in Wired Magazine promises “All the ways you can make reading on your phone easier“. It is a short article -- only about 850 words. Functionally, the advice is fair enough, with a few technical tricks one can use to adjust fonts, reduce on-screen clutter, and manage reading backlogs.
■ The key advice, though, is in the second sentence: “If you’ve got a lot of text to get through, you might find yourself turning to a Kindle instead, or even a good old-fashioned physical book”. No matter how many ways we adapt digital devices for text delivery, the “old-fashioned” print approach has certain insurmountable advantages. Be sure of this: A few hundred years from now, printed books will still disproportionately reward their readers for some of these reasons.
■ Reason #1: The eye and brain, working together, have evolved to prefer reflected light over projected light. Conventional ink-on-paper print products (or the very close replication thereof found in e-ink, like what is used in most Kindle readers) appeal to evolutionary preferences. In the natural world, only a few things actually generate light: Things like the Sun and fire. These things do not convey information, and in fact can be painful to observe for too long. Computer, tablet, and smartphone screens use projected light -- which is no small part of why they cause eye strain, at least some relief from which is found by turning to “night mode” or “eye comfort mode“. Any method that requires projected light is going to stand at a structural disadvantage.
■ Reason #2: Printed materials invite interaction with the text in the form of highlighting, marginalia, and other notes that come naturally when performed by hand. They take a different type and amount of coordination and concentration to perform on digital devices, assuming they are even possible (which they often are not). Yes, you can take notes with a browser window. No, it is not as instinctive as underlining a passage in a book using a pen. The greater the cognitive load required to perform the task, the more the reader is taken out of the act of reading and comprehending.
■ Reason #3: What’s printed on paper takes on a physical location in space. This can be advantageous on multiple levels: Many people recall where they encountered content as a physical act (e.g., “It was at the bottom of the page, about three pages back...”). Many more retain enough working memory of their reading that their eyes can dart effortlessly back and forth on the page as they re-read passages to compensate for distraction or confusion (e.g., “Hang on...I need to read that again”). Still others benefit from physical layout choices like footnotes, indices, and font sizes (a technique hilariously immortalized in The Onion’s “WA-” headline parody). All of these physical devices are basically impossible to replicate if the words have to move on a stationary screen instead of turning along with the page.
■ This is not to deny that digital reading experiences can be improved, nor that some physical reading experiences are terrible. Every experienced reader has been frustrated by type that is spaced poorly, in an illegible font, or spanning unnaturally wide columns that tax the eye’s ability to track. But if a fair amount of care and competence are brought to the act of print layout, then reading speed, comprehension, and convenience will almost inevitably and forever favor print over screens.
