Author: Lauren Morford
At the risk of sounding like I have skipped a generation, what is the future of reading?
Is it scrolling through summaries, skimming headlines, saving articles you never quite return to?
Are stories now something that arrive in fragments between notifications?
We live on screens. We work on them, write on them, communicate through them. Most of our days are spent hopping between tabs, messages and emails. It’s efficient, fast and occasionally brilliant.
But perhaps there comes a point where it’s worth switching off for a bit.
It’s World Book Day as I write this, and it got me thinking about the quiet power of the printed page. Not in a nostalgic, “everything was better before Wi-Fi” sort of way. Just in the sense that a book asks something different of us.
A screen demands attention.
A book rewards it.
The other evening I picked up a book that had been sitting patiently on the shelf for months. No alerts, no buzzing, no temptation to check something else halfway through a chapter. Just words doing what they’ve always done, building pictures in your head.
And oddly, it felt like switching off a noise you didn’t realise was there.
Nothing urgent was missed.
No world-changing emails arrived in that hour.
The internet carried on quite happily without me.
We often talk about attention as if it’s something that’s constantly under attack. But perhaps sometimes we just give it away too easily.
Books are stubborn things. They don’t flash. They don’t vibrate. They don’t try to drag you somewhere else after three minutes.
They simply wait for you to stay.
And of course, books aren’t the only things that benefit from a bit of paper and patience. For all the apps designed to capture our thoughts, there’s still something hard to beat about a notebook and a good old-fashioned pen. Ideas seem to slow down just enough to become clearer when you write them rather than type them.
Perhaps that’s why, in an age of tablets and touchscreens, the humble notebook remains one of the most popular promotional items businesses put their name on. For all our digital tools, we still trust paper to catch the important things.
So, in honour of World Book Day, maybe close a screen a little earlier than usual and pick up something with pages.
Give it half an hour.
You might remember why people have been doing it for the last few hundred years.
Alternatively, you could just watch the film version while checking your phone.
Screens demand attention. Pages reward it.
