Why print on paper cannot die

What does your smartphone smell like?

What sound does your device make when you shake an article?

What do you feel reading a text lit by a light that tires your eyes?

If reading on a screen brings you relief, you can stop here. You have no need for the emotions that memories evoke, for the gesture of turning a page, or for the unrepeatable smell of paper mixed with ink. You can go back to your cold, perfectly standardised devices.

For everyone else, paper still holds a precise power.

Matter makes content visible

Feeling the weight of a book, catching up over breakfast with a newspaper, leafing through a magazine whose pages are still joined where the blade has passed, recognising the importance of what we are about to read through the smell of paper and ink: these are sensations that confirm the presence of the body in the experience of reading.

Every time we come into tactile contact with a material, perception triggers a response in the nervous system. The brain receives signals, interprets them and builds associations. This is where attention, memory and emotion begin.

An editorial project does not simply arrange texts and images, it builds a coherent relationship between content, medium and perception. Editorial design defines hierarchy, proportion, rhythm and the choice of materials, and at the printing stage every decision can amplify the understanding of the message.

Thinking about the stock of a cover, the binding or the type of ink means making physical what would otherwise remain ethereal. Memory, when it meets matter, finds a place to settle. The mind engages and the body takes part, attention grows alongside curiosity.

Variation is part of the experience

Organic materials change. They absorb humidity, react to light and alter their own surface over time. They are neither neutral nor motionless: they carry a trace of the environment they live in.

The digital, however animated and intelligent, offers a more uniform experience instead. The medium stays the same in every circumstance, and this predictability can be efficient, but it tends to reduce surprise and to turn reading into a purely functional act.

Then there is the gesture.

With one click we can cross a hundred pages in a few seconds, but in doing so we lose part of the physical instinct that accompanies reading.

Try watching your hand as you turn a page. The movement recalls that of an artist working on a canvas. Some leaf through nervously and irregularly, some proceed slowly, some push the corner upward with the thumb, some guide the sheet with the index finger, and some grip the top edge with a small rotation of the wrist.

Even in a simple gesture we express ourselves. Every way of turning a page tells a state of mind and produces sounds that never repeat in quite the same way.

Paper, light and the quality of reading

Paper absorbs light and returns a surface that is less aggressive to the eye. Print works through subtractive colour synthesis, while screens work through additive synthesis and emit light.

The difference is not only technical. When we read on a screen the eye has to manage the contrast against a light source coming directly from the surface. This is why, after many hours, digital reading can feel more tiring, particularly in poor lighting conditions.

The time of day matters too. Reading on paper before sleep tends to favour a calmer transition into rest. Evening exposure to screen light, and to its blue component in particular, can interfere with the circadian rhythm and make falling asleep harder. The quality of sleep affects health, and choosing the right medium is a simple form of daily care.

The same information, a different experience

As a lover of Italian cooking, I would compare all this to the difference between a plate of pasta made with tomato, basil and fresh ingredients, and one made from an industrial concentrate.

The purpose is the same: to feed the body. But which of the two experiences recalls the colours of the countryside, the scents of childhood and the texture of a natural material? Which brings back the hands of your mother or your grandmother while they made lunch?

The content can be identical, the relationship with that content changes completely.

I am not suggesting we get rid of tablets or read only on paper. I am suggesting we use each medium with awareness: a good newspaper in the morning, a magazine over the lunch break, a film on screen after work, and something printed in the evening, before sleep.

Let matter shape your thoughts and, perhaps, your dreams as well.

S. Forcina / Design Director
For 46 pgs magazine