Printed books help you sleep better – and could cut risk of cancer

More and more these days, we hear how reading a device such as a mobile phone, tablet or e-book before you go to sleep at night, not only keeps you awake, but also gives you a poorer quality of sleep when you do finally nod off.

And there are even worse side-effects. 

But we also know the healthier solution – read a printed book at bedtime. (Or printed magazine, perhaps?)

According to a recent study by Harvard Medical School, healthy young adults were tested by alternatively asking them to read a light-emitting e-book and a printed book, within one hour before their bedtime.

The quality of their sleep – and the quality of their experience the next day – was then measured.

Those reading the printed book fared significantly better.

When the participants read the e-book at bedtime, they took longer to fall asleep, saying they felt less sleepy, compared with the other evenings when they read a book.

Significantly however, they also experienced sharply reduced mental alertness the next morning, saying it took them many hours longer to “fully wake up” than when they had read a printed book the night before.

According to the researchers: “These results indicate that reading a [light emitting] e-book in the hours before bedtime likely has unintended biological consequences that may adversely impact performance, health, and safety.”

Reading e-books at night delays a person's “circadian clock” and suppresses levels of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin, the researchers say.

They add: “The results of this study are of particular concern, given recent evidence linking chronic suppression of melatonin secretion by nocturnal light exposure with the risk of breast, colorectal, and advanced prostate cancer associated with night-shift work, which has now been classified as a probably carcinogen by the World Health Organisation.”

Ad tech is killing the online experience

Great article by Felix Salmon in The Guardian today about how advertising technology is ruining the online experience, particularly on news sites.

There is something wonderfully easy about reading a column in a physical - i.e. printed - newspaper. Without constantly being bombarded, distracted, and obstructed by digital advertising of all kinds, some of it obvious, some of it not.

Traditional advertising banners on websites (i.e. those that sit nicely in a corner of an online page where you never have to look) don't work very well any more, because hardly anyone clicks on them or pays them any notice.

So now, online publishers (including the Guardian's own site, ironically) use a huge number of often quite underhand techniques to fool us into looking at, and reading, gibberish content by online advertisers.

Worst are perhaps are the 'advertorials', i.e. advertising features, that masquerade as editorial. All the main news sites in the UK use this trick. On the Guardian's site, they are headlined "More stories from around the web". On the Telegraph.co.uk they are called 'Promoted stories'. And on the Dailymail.co.uk, they are called just "From the Web".

But the point that Felix Salmon also makes is that the hidden advertising on these sites is serving to slow down the whole experience of using the web.

By contrast, the great advantage with printed news media, is that advertisements in newspapers work in a complementary way, sitting alongside editorial unobtrusively. Readers who want to look at the advertising, do so. Those who don't, can easily ignore it. No one is offended by it. But enough readers pay the ads enough attention for the advertisers to get a good return on their investment. And everybody wins.

The digital myth

Increasingly, we live in an online world. We need to communicate instantly, quickly, incessantly. We all love, and increasingly need, our phones. Facebook. Messaging. Twitter. Texts. Everything that keeps us in touch quickly and easily with the people we love, and with those who are most important to us.

But we also yearn for some permanence. While our phones, emails, texts, and our apps give us instant gratification – we know we need more. We long too for the slower life, the slower read. For the joy of holding other people’s thoughts and feelings in our hand. The pleasure of having a good book with us, or a beautifully designed and printed magazine, or a small booklet about a place or experience that we are fond of. Running our fingers over the pages. Dwelling on them. Knowing that those ideas, those thoughts,  those feelings will be there again for us after we have put them down. Because we really own them. In printed form, they are ours.

We love digital communications too, but there is also a kind of terror. The fear of not always being part of a majority that is ‘moving on’, away from permanence, and towards constant instability. The fear of being left behind in a world that goes seemingly ever faster.

Digital. Online. Instant. Connected. Included. We love it. But we also hate it. We feel drawn to it like a drug. We know we need some of these drugs to keep us alive in this world. But we also know  that these drugs – or, at least, too much of them, too frequently – can also kill us, kill our feelings, our sense of space, our freedom to choose – to be ourselves.

Some of us. Most of us. All of us, probably, need something else. Or some things else. Those ‘somethings’  are so often the beautiful printed objects that are printed, and bound. Stitched together. Finished with silky effects. Or gloss touches. The things give us insight into the world, but also give us time to reflect. That we can keep on our shelves around us for the rest of our lives. That we can share with those who are physically present with us, face to face.

We need to celebrate print, in all its shapes and forms. Those who love print, (and I think that’s almost every one of us – even if only secretly), must shout loud about why it means so much to us, and does us so much good. And we must fight the myth – the bullying consensus – that all that’s digital is good. That we all have to ditch everything in print in favour of digital, every time. That we all have to “get with it” and “move on”, and go online with absolutely every form of communication.

Print gives us power. Power to stand aside, and take our time. To inhabit a space to be ourselves.