People who can't give up paper

Amazon removing 1984 on people's kindles all the way back in 2009 was a wake-up call. Digital media/content is open to revision in a way that physical media/content is not.

I have swung back around and now buy many physical books/blurays/etc for things I really love or think are important because my faith that companies/govt won't decide I cant have that version anymore is very low.

Two years ago I moved back to paper for my productivity and notetaking after about 7 years going fully digital. There are a lot of advantages for me. Some of those may apply to others:

- Tactile feeling and aesthetics. My writing is not very beautiful, but a stack of papers filled with my notes and diagrams is very inspiring.

- Paper is an offline, distraction-free medium. I think better with paper. Maybe it is a cultural habit.

- Paper won't disappear one day due to bad battery, untested OS update, malware, EOL for cloud service etc. Losing a couple of sheets of paper is easier than electronic device. But when speaking about losing a bulk of notes, it is much easier to lose it electronically than physically.

- Paper is forgiving. I can draw quick-and-dirty diagram in a minute and move on. It is hard to draw quick-and-dirty diagram on a computer. I will spend at least a couple of minutes deciding which app will be more convenient to draw this diagram, about ten minutes fighting an app, and up to an hour fighting my perfectionism, placing all shapes in proper places in grid.

- A sheet of paper is bounded, which helps with internal distractions. If I need to make a TODO list, I will take a smaller sheet, and fit all important things there.

- When you have large desk, you can spread a lot of paper sheets on it and see it all at the same time. Rearrange it, put it in stacks by some criterion, and so on. And neither scrolling nor list of thumbnails work as good as flipping through a paper book.

Disadvantages are:

- Lack of search function. I didn't try Apple Notes document scanning recently, maybe some kind of handwriting recognition is there and it will be enough to just take photos of all my notes.

- Portability: I need a desk with enough free space for both laptop and papers (so, mostly in terms of depth - probably a problem for open space offices).

I have some hopes for Apple Vision Pro (maybe in V2 or V3). I think it has a potential to bring some of these advantages to digital world :)

Too be fair I don't think the anti-paper crowd are talking about me. The amount of paper I consume is minuscule compared to large businesses. I use paper a lot more than the average person. I make paper from recycled junk mail, and I hand write all of my notes. I retain things better when I write them down on paper. I also look at screens for 12 hours a day so staring at a piece of paper is a reprieve.

My only concern with moving entirely to digital is that it is not strictly better. Digital should be the best way to consume media but it often isn't. I don't own the digital media like I do with physical media. Buying brand new digital media is also waaay more expensive then getting used books on Ebay. This is all on top of the fact that we can barely keep services around for more than 10 years without them going away and being stuck with proprietary formats that are not accessible anymore.

I am concerned for the day where everything is all digital, and then something catastrophic happens and we lose a significant chunk of our information. But maybe I'm just giving myself FUD

I think paper probably really does have value for mental retention, but digital is so convenient it's easy to totally forget paper is a thing.

Paper is easier to annotate, but if you didn't grow up with lots of paper, you don't notice, because annotating isn't something you think about, you mostly think in terms of quoting and leaving a comment.

The medium shapes your thinking, and the stuff that's hard to do on paper doesn't really occur to you as something you'd want to do, unless you're deeply familiar with it. Just like any technology.

Perhaps that's the big benefit, adding more variety of ways of thinking.

The security properties are also really really different, and really intuitive, and quite strong too: if you have physical possession you have total access, otherwise none at all.

With a computing device, only if you are certain there is no wifi/bluetooth/cellular/etc hardware inside the device, can you have a similar trust. And the days are rapidly coming when there's no such thing as a device without such hardware, not even a watch.

With computing devices, you do get the ability to encrypt data at rest, so for example, a locked physical paper diary is less secure in that sense than an encrypted text file. But the possible number of actors that would attempt to break the security for a physical paper document is much lower, only whoever is nearby, not everyone on the entire internet.

If I had something I really didn't want to get out, these days, I'd be much more likely to recommend the use of a notebook in a safe than an encrypted file on a laptop or phone or something. It doesn't matter how encrypted it is if my device gets compromised.

(If it had to be electronic, it'd be a laptop with no working networking hardware, in a safe.)