In an age of ubiquitous glowing screens filled with endless, scrolling seas of text and images, I find myself increasingly drawn to reading on paper vs. screen, and I relish the relatively old-fashioned experience of solitary, disconnected, page-based reading. I find that I read better in this form, with greater enjoyment and understanding. I love to immerse myself in a book, journal, story, article, or essay (or poem, play, etc.) in the relatively peaceful, focused realm of the offline and the analog, where I can become deeply and totally absorbed in private communion with the author and his or her vision.
This may, I suppose, be a function of my upbringing in the pre-internet era, when all reading was done on paper. I didn’t acquire my first computer, an Apple IIe, until I was 14 years old, and the idea of reading a book on that green-lit screen was unthinkable (though I did read a ton of words on it while playing text-based fantasy games like Wizardry). The internet didn’t enter my world until I was in my mid-twenties, when the World Wide Web became publicly available, and by that time my set point as a reader was essentially established.
Though it took me some time to recognize the differences between online and page-based reading, I eventually came to understand that my preference for reading on paper vs. screen is rooted in something deeper: I crave text that is static and set, not fluid and reflowing. I want to read words that are carefully laid out on stable pages instead of ones that shimmer and shift like quicksilver, or like Proteus morphing under my hands into endlessly shifting shapes.
Such text, it turns out—the stable, set kind, I mean—forms an automatic aid to mapping and remembering what I have read. It provides something I can return to, reference, and use as a scaffolding for knowledge, memory, and appreciation. I can’t tell you how many important paragraphs and passages in my personal library of life-changing books I can still map in memory to their physical positioning on the page where I first encountered them and underlined or annotated them by hand. Additionally, text like this, deliberately laid out on pages with care for arrangement, appearance, and the coherence of these qualities with the actual content of the words, is much more amenable to that deep immersion. You can lose yourself in it.
For more on this theme, see my Living Dark essay, “Introducing the Living Dark Reader,” where I explore this approach to reading and the idea of curating a personal, slow-reading digital magazine.