Why I Still Prefer Reading on Paper

I’m not a purist about reading in print. I probably read twice as much material online as on paper. I listen to Hoopla audiobooks every day while doing needlepoint. I read the Atlantic online. And yet beside my place at the kitchen table there’s a stack of books. I buy them, I keep them, I get them out again and I look things up.

I’m currently reading Playback, the last novel written by Raymond Chandler. Hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe is on the case again in a coastal town between San Diego and Los Angeles. And I’m reading this novel on paper. It’s part of a series of seven books by Chandler which Vintage Crime brought out in paperback in 1988. I checked them out from the library one by one, and when I sit down to dinner, I put one beside me to read.

Why do I keep Reading on Paper?

I’m convinced that the things you find in a paper book tend to be higher quality than what you find on the internet. After all, people really got paid for writing the books. They didn’t get compensated by advertisements being looked at.The preparation of such a task takes a lot of time. It’s almost a labor of love. You just don’t see that kind of thing in most online venues. At least not ones without a paywall.

There is no experience quite so soothing, quite so deep as reading on paper. The way you read a physical book is different. You sit deep in the chair and hold the book close. It’s not heavy, it’s not unwieldy, it doesn’t need to be plugged in, and no one can look through it and see you. A person reading is all alone with a book. You’re all alone with the author. This is a special experience. It gives us access to all the great minds of history.

Flying on the Wings of Reading

And the experience of reading a physical book reminds me of the experience of reading as a child, those hours and hours lost in a book. Reading in childhood was different; back then no one was trying to tell you anything in the book or telling you to do anything. Reading was simply another world you could go into, lying on your bed in the summer, flying on the wings of reading.

My library has probably close to a thousand books and I look through them periodically. Yes I do give some of them away. But certain books must stay forever. My copy of The Great Gatsby, and Moby Dick, which if you clear your mind will tell you about the people we came from. And even Gone with the Wind, which I probably should disavow, but Mitchell, she understood dealing with men like no one else in history. You can’t find stuff like what Mitchell wrote about men on the internet. It’s been forgotten. You don’t say “I will” or “I won’t,” according to Mitchell – “Young misses should cast down their eyes and say ‘I might.’ Scarlett “conceals her intellect behind a face as bland as a baby’s.”

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury wrote of a society in which they tried to burn all the books. It’s thought provoking. Could it happen here?

Perhaps the book retains also this: once it’s been written it doesn’t get changed, you can’t write a book and then claim you didn’t say that. Would Mitchell have removed her racism, Fitzgerald removed the drink that ultimately killed him?  It’s true you can use the Way Back Machine on the internet to find out what was on the web before it was changed,  but internet text is changeable, not permanent. This means, on the internet, you can write more casually and less carefully.

Audiobooks are Gold

No one loves an audiobook like me. I can remember putting a cassette tape into the player back when I was still in college and picking up quilting squares and sewing while listening to Amy Tan read her book The Kitchen God’s Wife. How many times did I quote her words about the character, Wen Foo: “That bad man, my first husband, never mention his name, never let me even know that he’s alive!”

I never found anything like Wen Foo on the internet either. Wen Foo is the kind of person you only meet on paper. Or in recordings of books that came out originally on paper.

The Internet Is Great

I admit there’s nothing better than getting a link from someone for some really interesting article about something you probably shouldn’t waste time on, usually involving trials of people who’ve done horrible things…I love reading those articles on my phone. Guilty pleasures we call them.

But Paper Remains

It remains because it’s still here. it requires no electronic apparatus to maintain it. If you keep the books they stay. In elementary school, we have the kids reading on paper. Books are far more efficient for them than when they read on digital devices. It’s been shown in research Such as in the book, The Digital Delusion, that reading on computers doesn’t drive learnings as fast as on paper in classrooms. In particular, for young readers, the words don’t get processed the same way. There’s something about the physical page and finding words in a location on the page that helps students develop understanding.

Somehow, Paper is Easy on the Eyes

For hundreds of years typesetters developed serif and sans-serif text and columns and sizes, each one designed to make reading easier and faster. I do wonder if perhaps one reason I like reading on paper better is that my eyes are not as good as they were, and reading on the phone often involves text that is somewhat inscrutable. This doesn’t make sense because text on the internet should be easy to read…yeah I think paper text is easier.

Concrete Places for Words

There’s a place for reading on paper and there are places for reading books. In my house are my bookshelves and my easy chair. And there’s also the library where I still like to walk among the aisles, looking at the titles, examining the colors, parsing what the author might have to say just from the title alone. I stop and pick up a book and read the first paragraph. In just 5 seconds you go from looking at the outside of the book to reading the first ideas.

Reading on the internet can’t match that; you’ve got to open three windows and make sure you’re using the right speakers to get a book on Hoopla. And you’ve got to know what you’re looking for, to have keywords, to find a book on Hoopla. You can’t just walk down an aisle and look for something that somehow appeals to an undefinable scanning of your eyes. Finding book covers is a mystery, but trying to match them to previous book covers whose colors somehow told you what was inside you would enjoy is a tried and true process.

This is how I found Raymond Chandler! I was in the library and I was walking down the mystery aisle. And I saw the set of paperback books. I don’t even remember what I thought. I just know that I pulled the book out and I opened up the front page and I read the first paragraph and a world popped into my mind. There he was, the detective sitting at his desk, bored, with nothing to do. And then there was a knock …

I closed the book. I knew I wanted to find out what happened. I wanted to find out who was going to come in that door. I was going to eat dinner with this book in front of me and I was going to go on a journey with Philip Marlow into all the dangerous places where the real me could never go.

Wandering in the World of Words

Perhaps that is the final answer to why I read books on paper. It’s the immersion, the feeling of being totally absorbed into that other world that exists deep inside our mind. We learned how to do this in childhood, to pick up a book, to follow the text, and to let go like a child learning to swim. The child lets go of the edge of the pool and goes out into the water and sustains herself by the stroking of arms and legs. The reader launches into another world where, it would seem, anything is possible. She is truly herself and time passes away and transcendence takes over.

That is what you get when you read a book on paper. That is why the bookshelf is still full even as the internet becomes ever more all-consuming and takes up so much time. Every day I read books. And today, right now, I’m going back to Philip Marlow who has an appointment with a beautiful woman whom he doesn’t trust …

And more will be revealed.