Don't pulp your paper just yet
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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As more and more people start using tablets and eReaders instead of flicking through pages of print, it’s not surprising to find the paper industry predicting that consumption of its products is about to fall off a cliff. But a recent academic study suggests that, if you want people to remember what they’ve read, we shouldn’t be too quick to ditch paper.

All the forest products research body RISI had to do to reach its apocalyptic conclusion about the paper industry was to track the rise of tablet computer sales – from 15 million in their first year of availability to a projected 200 million in North America in 2015, with an additional fourfold increase in the use of eReaders over the next five years.

For the RISI study (single print copy $5,900) the implications are clear. People will be using these devices to read content that they previously took from newspapers, magazines and books, and we’re going to need 20% less paper for magazines alone over the next 15 years.

But from the decision-maker’s point of view, is this necessarily a good idea? Medium Matters, a study by a team from the School of Journalism & Communication at the University of Oregon, suggests that if you read it in print, you’re more likely to recall it.

A caveat first of all: this was a very small study with only 45 subjects, and the researchers looked at newspaper reading only, not the more sustained reading effort required for journal articles or books. Nevertheless the results were striking: given a copy of that day’s New York Times to peruse, either online or in print, the print readers remembered significantly more topics than the online ones.

True, there wasn’t much difference between the two groups in their recall of the actual headlines. But when it came to recalling the main points of each story, the print readers won – and did so even though they’d tended to read less of each story.

It’s not the first time recently that the headlong dash to screen-based reading has been called into question. Launching the European edition of his eponymous magazine earlier this year, Steve Forbes also cited survey data suggesting that print allowed decision-makers to deal in stories in a much more thorough way (LiveWire coverage here).

Studies such as these suggest that information managers should at least query and qualify any management assumptions that migrating to electronic content is automatically more cost-effective. And if info pros need more evidence to support their position, they could cite the example of Barnes & Noble’s newly launched Social Media Monthly which – despite its focus on an activity that is uncompromisingly digital – is published in (gasp!) print.

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