The Persistent Predilection for Paper

Abstract

When it comes to book-length texts, readers around the world continue to display a preference for print over screens. This article speculates about the possible reasons why digitisation has not (yet) affected the printed book the way it has other media. Among the reasons advanced are emotional and sentimental attachment at a personal level; the long history of prestige of printed books at a social level; the fixity of print, which answers better to the embodied nature of human cognition than the ephemerality and fluidity of the immaterial digital text; and the unconscious appreciation that the investment required for the production of material goods is likely to act as a publication membrane filtering out the most worthless texts. To this may be added a certain weariness about the virtual world which seems to have set in more recently.