3 Psych Reasons to Prefer Print
Yes, I've focused on Wikipedia as a journalist. But I still believe in the power of print.
I’m most known in online circles as a journalist who has written lots of news stories (and even a book) inspired by Wikipedia—a website that exists in part because people decided that print encyclopedias were too bulky, too gatekept, and too slow to keep up with the pace of knowledge.
I’m also a tech lawyer by trade. My area of practice? Online platforms and IT transactions.
In short, I’m the last person you would expect to be making a case for printed works. For paper books, magazines, and newspapers. For all these old-school, analog materials.
And yet here we are.
In an age ruled by short-form video and algorithmic curation, I find myself more and more pulled toward traditional paper and ink.
Here are three psychological reasons that I’ve come to believe that print is uniquely good for us, and that we turn away from printed works at our peril:
Print gives the reader more control. Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 is set in a dystopian world where all books are burned, and TV dominates the culture. People spend their lives at home watching television on giant “parlor walls” that bombard them with nonstop entertainment. Everyone is obsessed with their personal screens. The main character’s wife is petrified of leaving her house for fear of missing a moment with her on-screen “family.”
Although Bradbury wrote his book in 1953, there’s a natural parallel to today’s screen addiction. Whether it’s scrolling TikTok or Instagram Reels on your phone, or spending hours watching cable news, most video content is designed to discourage reflection and keep you watching.
Sometimes in the morning, or late at night, I have found myself getting sucked into scrolling shortform videos. I only meant to watch a few minutes, but before I know it, I’ve wasted an hour staring at the tiny screen. In moments like this, it can certainly feel like the phone has godlike powers, and I’m a mere mortal subject to its cruel whims.
I never feel this way when I’m reading physical books. Sure, successful authors encourage readers to keep turning pages. But we know deep down that printed works tend to be less addictive than video. Print is less likely to ensnare you. Bradbury has a character address this difference in his novel:“You can shut [a book]. Say, ‘Hold on a moment.’ You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlor? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world.”
Isn’t that a beautifully empowering thought? You can play God to a book. By the way, the latest neuroscience supports Bradbury’s statement: Digital media is more likely to turn us into dopamine addicts. By contrast, reading a book is a less stimulating but harder task. And that ultimately leaves us feeling more fulfilled and in control.
Print helps readers concentrate, leading to higher comprehension. We all know that electronic devices are more likely to distract us from an immersive reader experience, pinging us with advertisements, email notifications, or the temptation to check on social media. The WiFi connection on a Kindle shows the other books on sale at Amazon—enticing us to do anything except for focus on the text.
That’s why the author and famous social media minimalist Cal Newport has a strong preference for physical books. Yes, he’ll sometimes deviate and read a book on Kindle (but not the iPhone), but that’s only on the rare occasion that he doesn’t have time to wait for delivery of a physical book. And that’s a very limited exception. As he wrote on his blog, “For demanding books, I’ll almost always use physical, as I have an easier time mustering concentration when I have a physical object to manipulate.”
But does enhancing concentration lead to greater understanding of the text? I was under the impression that there was still significant debate among experts about whether people learned more from physical books than e-readers. While some critics say that studies with a larger sample size still need to be conducted, the research so far suggests a verdict: Reader comprehension is significantly better with physical books than e-readers.It seems like physical books work better for us precisely because we are embodied beings. Holding the weight of the book in your hand, turning the pages, writing notes in the margins, and highlighting your favorite passages—these are all sensations that are experienced in the body and thus leave a more lasting impression in our brains. According to researchers, turning pages as we read creates an “index” in the brain, mapping what we read visually to a particular page.
In other words, the indelible ink characters on a page help us to create a mental map. That’s not the case with the flickering ghost characters on a screen. On-screen text appears and disappears without a fixed location, which makes it harder for our brains to index.
Print may help cure smartphone addiction. I have had an intuition for a while now that one way to improve our increasingly short attention spans is by reading from a very long novel. I’ll speak for myself—since I’m feeling increasingly limited in my ability to concentrate, I’ve tried building up my endurance by reading George Eliot’s 800-page tome Middlemarch.
Notice how I was thinking about the issue of concentration as if it’s a muscle that had weakened over time because of smartphones and therefore needed more exercise. I did not frame the smartphone problem as an addiction in need of a cure.
That’s why this latest study caught my attention: According to research from Catholic University of Indonesia, printed media is more effective than social media in reducing the smartphone addiction levels of participants. Could old-fashioned print help cure the smartphone zombie epidemic?
I took a look at the research paper itself to see what I could glean beyond the headline. The study placed 54 subjects into two test groups that were each given a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) course that covered topics such as “negative impacts of excessive use of smartphones” and “steps to reduce smartphone usage.” Like most CBT programs, the lessons focused on paying greater attention throughout the day and adopting healthier beliefs about the technology.
The only difference between the two test groups was in the type of media used to deliver the lessons to recipients. One group got the training via social media and the other through printed media—specifically leaflets.
And the leaflets won the day! While both cohorts saw a statistically significant decrease in smartphone addiction rates, the group receiving leaflets (printed media) saw greater improvement than those who got the training digitally.The study’s authors caution that more research is needed in this area, but I suspect their preliminary research is already pointing to an important theme: We experience a lot of our current social ills because of the ethereal world, the world of websites and apps. But just because that’s where the disease originates doesn’t mean that’s where we’ll find the cure. We’re more likely to draw our medicine from the material world. The world of leaflets, the world of print.
If there’s interest, I’d like to continue this series and meditate on the social and cultural virtues of printed works. Please let me know what you think!
On a different note, I’ve had the chance to talk about Wikipedia and information ecosystems in a few recent places:Today, Explained (Vox’s news explainer podcast) - “What did Wikipedia do?” (May 9, 2025)
Connecticut Public Radio (The Colin McEnroe Show) - “What Wikipedia can teach us” (May 14, 2025)
The Washington Post - “Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney” (April 25, 2025)
Wishing you and yours a happy Memorial Day weekend.
Stephen - I've been a written word enthusiast and hard copy reader, letter writer and book club starter who is very interested in more discourse on this topic. In terms of retention of content, my mind is able to pull specific threads and characters by name, years after reading hard copy, yet with on-line content these themes rarely come back to me vividly or resonate as long over time. Just one brief anecdote to share.
I’m interested in more on this Stephen. Over the course of this last academic year I’ve led a middle-school “book club” where we’ve primarily read print books and, despite all the noise about young people not reading, I’ve been really impressed by how engaged my kids have been with print. We all bring our books to our meetups and you can see where we are, point out the sections we like. Long live print!