Tablet versus paper
Paper stimulates the brain, while tablets lull your neurons to sleep
Written by Gunter Pauli,
January 4, 2023
Article of 2,300 words
As the author of 25 books and 365 fables, I have a keen interest in understanding how best to reach my audience. Furthermore, I'm interested in how to ensure my readers remember what I've written, and even how I might influence their thoughts and actions. My first books were published in 1987. These were, of course, printed editions.
However, all my books were created on a computer thanks to my mother's foresight in teaching me to use all ten fingers to type at a rate of 60 to 80 words per minute. I enjoyed the arrival of the little Macintosh in 1984, and a year later, I discovered the wonders of desktop publishing (DTP) with that high-quality Apple LaserWriter.
From Book Printing to Instant Publishing:
The arrival of self-publishing—still on paper—with the ability to write a book and have it in a print-ready format within days was a revolution that inspired me to start a new business: instant publishing. That same year, 1985, I partnered with Roularta, the Belgian media group, to create Roularta Books. We focused on highly topical subjects, such as how to exploit loopholes in the new tax law and the details of the takeover bid by Carlo de Benedetti, the Italian magnate who attempted to seize control of Société Générale, Belgium's largest financial group.
We first did this in 1986 for Lester Brown's "State of the World," which, combined with the American edition, sold over 250,000 copies. Sure, instant publishing is like instant coffee: it contains caffeine, but if you want a good morning drink, you'd better take the time to make a better one.
The financial press goes digital.
The ongoing digitization of the media has revolutionized the press. As Secretary General of UPEFE, the French acronym for the association of financial and economic media in Europe, I have had the privilege of being at the forefront of this digital transition with Les Echos and La Tribune (France), Actualidad Economic with Expansión (Spain), Handelsblatt and Wirtschaftswoche (Germany), Il Sole 24 Ore (Italy), Vida Economica (Portugal) and Dagens Industri (Sweden), to name just a few.
We then delivered a print-ready edition of the consolidated European companies, tailored to a local audience. The digital world was advancing rapidly and changing the way information was handled. This generated a common European advertising platform that surpassed the dominant global business ranking known as "The Fortune 500" in terms of copies, readership, and revenue.
Innovations in Print Waste Management.
However, while we processed information digitally, we still used print to communicate. Floppy disks containing the same information about companies simply didn't appeal to the market, unlike printed editions. This changed with the arrival of Kindle books in 2007, and soon after, the iPad and tablets. Since I began publishing my fables—first in Colombia with the United Nations, then in Germany at the Hanover World Expo in 2000, with the city of Curitiba in Brazil in 2001, and finally with the Chinese government—there has been a growing interest in accessing my illustrated fables in digital format.
At first, I resisted. As an avid reader of comics like Tintin, I couldn't imagine reading illustrated stories on a flat screen. I felt the need for tactile contact with the paper and visual contact with the color printing. How could I possibly enjoy reading in shades of gray? Furthermore, it seemed I wouldn't grasp the content as easily with so much detail if it were available on a screen with controlled lighting.
One solution was to redraw the fables as strips and use the offcuts from the printing presses to create folded stories. My first fable, "The Strongest Tree" (written in 1990), was translated into 26 languages and printed on such offcuts at a fraction of the cost of a printed booklet. My stories were available for less than a cent per copy, using offcuts from the paper of the Deutsche Bank annual report, resulting in a marginal cost of just €10,000 for a million copies. Since the paper and ink were free, the only cost was folding this strip of paper into an easy-to-read, lined book barely the size of a child's hand.
In 2001, the city of Curitiba offered a unique platform for sharing fables with children. Following a decision by Casio Taniguchi, then mayor, the teachers' union approved the introduction of these fables as a tool to bring nature, sustainability, and science to all children.
This required training 6,000 teachers and reached 120,000 schoolchildren with 11 fables translated into Portuguese. We needed 1.4 million copies. A traditional printing job would have depleted the city's education budget.
Learning through print surpasses digital.
Then, the Chinese government invited me to embark on the biggest fable project of my life. After three years of testing 36 fables in several hundred schools in Wuxi, the China Society for the Promotion of Science and Technology, with the support of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, decided that the fables should be made available to 5,000 green schools, with an average of 2,000 children per school. The digital option seemed like the smart decision. The sheer volume of 10 million printed copies seemed to make this project very large in terms of scale. The Ministry's China Environmental Education and Communication Unit (CEEC) took on the challenge of translating the fables, training teachers, organizing model classes, printing, and distributing the copies.
The results were astonishing: children reading from a printed copy outperformed those working with digital versions on tablets.
The Shift from 2D to 3D Reading:
The key question educators were asking was "why?" A wide range of debates ensued, and the arguments were compelling: a tablet uses 1,000 times fewer neurons than printed books.
"How?" was the obvious next question. Scientists, particularly neuroscience experts, were persuasive in their arguments. When you read on a tablet, you read on a screen with controlled lighting. This facilitates reading by focusing on the text and illustrations in just two dimensions. This clearly reduces the need to activate the brain. Furthermore, infrared sensors continuously monitor lighting conditions and adjust the screen brightness to maintain a comparable surface intensity, further facilitating easy reading. Is this a good thing?
According to leading brain experts like Rodolfo Llinas, a professor at New York University School of Medicine, the deliberate activation of brain cells could even stimulate the creation of new neurons and increase their interactions.
The Digital Guardian vs. the Print Financial Times:
As I began reading more and more news on digital screens, I decided to test this Chinese experiment based on reading Gunter's Fables by myself. The results were unsurprising: whenever I read The Guardian on my phone, the content was fleeting. Whenever I read The Financial Times, especially the opinion pieces, on the distinctive salmon-colored paper, the content and arguments lingered with me much longer.
While this personal experience is just one anecdote in the broader research on the impact of digital versus print reading, the science behind observations with millions of children has led to the Chinese government's bold decision: children aged 3 to 15 will read Gunter's Fables in China's 795,000 schools in print only.
Tip: Smart children need to read printed books.
Children are born with an incredible innate capacity for learning. Everyone has the right and the ability to be intelligent. Today, all policymakers feel the need to create a digitally literate generation. Consequently, it is common to have children work with tablets and computers. However, this new understanding of the importance of reading print versus digital should encourage policymakers to focus less on digital and more on securing print reading. Printing activates and even produces neurons, perhaps a thousand times more. This then stimulates the brain and makes us more alert, even happier.
This observation likely applies not only to children in their formative years, but also to adults who desperately need to stimulate their minds. Too many of us have become sheep, following polarized information and increasingly living in fear. There is ample room to maintain independent thinking through the formation of opinions and lifelong learning—prerequisites for a resilient democracy.
The conclusion is that we should all get back into the habit of reading a book regularly, while also browsing newspapers and magazines daily. Reading printed material could one day be celebrated as one of the best tools for stimulating reasoning with mindfulness and for preventing forgetfulness through indifference.
Every day I return to my favorite newsstand in town and pick up a few copies of the newspaper. My brain feels challenged.
About the author
Gunter Pauli is an entrepreneur and, for over a decade, president of Novamont, the European leader in bioplastics. He translates scientific and commercial innovation into compelling narratives. In 2019, he was named one of the top ten science teachers in China.
Photographs are available upon request
