A Year of Reading on Paper

A year ago I bought a cheap paperback at an airport — the kind of impulse purchase you make when the gate is delayed and the screens have run out of charge. I finished it on the flight. I have not gone back to reading on a phone since.

This is not a manifesto. Screens are fine. They are convenient, they are searchable, and for a great many people they are the only affordable option. But I want to record what changed for me, because the change was larger than I expected.

What I read

I read forty-one books this year. That is not a number I am proud of, exactly — it is just a number. What matters to me is the shape of the reading: thirty-two of those books were on paper, nine were on a screen. A year earlier, the ratio was almost reversed.

The books that stayed with me were almost all on paper:

• Stoner, by John Williams. The kind of novel that makes you sit very still for an hour after finishing it.
• The Peregrine, by J. A. Baker. A book about watching hawks that is really a book about losing yourself in attention.
• A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander. Not a book you read so much as a book you wander through.
• Letters to a Young Poet, by Rilke. I re-read this every few years and underline different sentences each time.

The screen books, with one or two exceptions, did not stick. I can remember their titles and roughly what they were about, but I cannot remember the texture of reading them.

Why paper works (for me)

I have a few guesses about why this is. None of them are scientific.

The first is friction. A phone is a device designed to interrupt you, and the things it interrupts you with are usually more urgent-feeling than a novel. A book has no notifications. The only way to find out what happens next is to keep reading.

The second is embodiment. I remember where on the page a sentence was. I remember whether I was holding the book with one hand or two. I remember the weight of it. These are not important details, but they are scaffolding — they give the words a place to live in my head.

The third is finality. A book does not have a tab open next to it. There is no temptation to check. The page is the page.

The cost

Books are heavy. They take up space. They are expensive, especially if you live somewhere without a good library. They are slow to acquire — you cannot download one at 11pm because you heard about it on a podcast.

These are real costs. I have a shelf in my apartment that is now two deep and threatening to spill onto the floor. I am running out of room.

But the costs are also, in a strange way, benefits. The friction of acquiring a book means I think harder about which book I want. The weight of carrying it means I finish the ones I start. The slowness is the feature.

What I would skip

I will say this in defense of screens: they are better for some things. Reference books, in particular, are much better as searchable text. I would not read a cookbook on paper, and I would not read a programming book on paper either — the code samples need to be copy-pasteable.

But for anything I want to inhabit — a novel, an essay collection, a long work of non-fiction — I will take the paper version from now on. The year proved it to me, in a way I had suspected but not confirmed.

If you are curious, my recommendation is not to swear off screens. Just try one book on paper. Read it at night, with the phone in another room. See if the experience is different. I suspect it will be.