Paper and Pixels

Where lies the prestige, print rendered on paper or in pixels? I attended a digital publishing summit last week, and that was one of the core themes that beguiled attendees throughout the course of the day. As a digital editor my reflex is to reach for digital. And while having just typed that sentence on a retina-display, I also just ordered a host of books for my physical bookshelf and not my e-reader. Why, because physical books have a better user experience. For now. I don’t know if I’ve said this here before, but I think prestige of print is evolving more toward the electronic arena. To me I see it as a question or technological breakthroughs: better screens, better batteries, more organic technologies that can render the digital in a more lifelike way. If those breakthroughs come to pass, I think the difficulty in resolving this question for most will fall away.