
Why digital natives prefer reading in print - sergeant3
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/why-digital-natives-prefer-reading-in-print-yes-you-read-that-right/2015/02/22/8596ca86-b871-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html
======
Udo
Digital media are failing, especially eBooks are, and it to me it feels like a
huge cultural regression.

In the nineties, I digitized my CD collection and haven't looked back. I did
the same with my DVDs, and eventually I got (DRM-free or cracked) eBook
versions of all books that were important to me. Doing away with all those
physical storage objects felt _so liberating_ , I can't even describe it.
Plus, I can have _all_ my stuff with me wherever I go. I do enjoy reading on
my iPad, too.

However, nobody I know of made this leap. Usually, older people like me do
have some sort of ripped movie or eBook collection which they don't use.
Millennials, however, use physical media all the way, and even where they
don't they accept only DRM'ed, thoroughly walled gardens where you can rent
stuff for a limited time and those companies only allow you to consume things
in a very restrictive manner. They have _huge_ DVD collections, they started
printing out their photos again, they mostly _only_ read paper-based books,
they prefer streaming content via crappy proprietary channels, and I'm not
even sure many of them would know how to copy a file if their life depended on
it.

This feels like an immense failure to me, not only because I feel isolated in
my content consumption habits, but also because we've somehow managed to move
backwards for purely cultural reasons. It's a loss of capability, and a loss
of personal freedom and empowerment.

~~~
smeyer
>they started printing out their photos again

You lost me here. I'm firmly a "millennial", and I can't recall ever seeing a
friend with printed photos from the last four years other than the occasional
art student. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your overarching point, but
this part really rings very hollow to me.

~~~
gglitch
My family prints out pictures. We of course have hundreds of gigs of digital,
but the pleasure of having physical books of curated sets of our most loved
photos, e.g. of our vacations and kids, is way more powerful than staring at
them on our TV or laptops. (&FWIW I'm right at the cusp of gens X and Y.)

~~~
w1ntermute
That might be fine if you have lots of space in your house and don't plan to
move any time soon, but I've kept everything digital because I don't have much
space in my apartment and I might move within a year (when my lease is up).
It's fantastic not having to deal with physical goods.

------
romaniv
Most of the fiction books I've read in the last decade I've read on a screen.
But I still strongly prefer print as long as it's not prohibitively expensive.
There are so many advantages to printed books that people ignore it's not even
funny.

Most of the fiction books I've read in the last decade I've read on a screen.
But I still strongly prefer print as long as it's not prohibitively expensive.
There are so many advantages to printed books that people ignore it's not even
funny.

\- No need for batteries.

\- You can gift them.

\- You can lend them.

\- You can sell them.

\- You can add sticky notes to bookmark and add notes without relying on some
crappy software.

\- No need for constant backups. Many books have been preserved for
_generations_. People have trouble finding files from couple years ago.

\- Format-agnostic. Remember about all the dead floppy drives and outdated
formats, such as VHS and ZipDrive.)

\- Great decoration, conversation starter and a kind of personal statement.

\- As ridiculous as it may sound, I can visually "scan" a paper book faster
than I can scan a file on the screen. This often is much more useful than
search because I rarely remember the exact wording of things I need to find.

\- Personally, I remember when and where I bought most of the physical books.
Seeing them on a shelf serves as a great reminder. You are less likely to
forget about physical book, than about a file. Before you proclaim this a
silly point, take a look at your Steam/GOG "library". Do you even remember
what's there? Do you remember how and when you bought it? Does it bring any
contextual memories?

I can continue the list, just don't want to.

~~~
xasos
> \- As ridiculous as it may sound, I can visually "scan" a paper book faster
> than I can scan a file on the screen. This often is much more useful than
> search because I rarely remember the exact wording of things I need to find.

This is the main reason I still use paper. While digital may be cheaper and
more portable, print is so much easier in the eyes and I tend to read much
faster than on a bright panel.

~~~
omaranto
Have you tried an e-ink screen?

~~~
xasos
I haven't, but would to give it a shot in the future. I feel like it would be
a hassle to convert books that aren't already ePub/(insert DRM format here)
though. Do you find this to be a problem?

~~~
omaranto
Well, I had an old Sony PR-505 eReader and while it could read PDF's it
ccertainly wasn't ideally suited to it. I did usually preprocess them by at
least cropping the margins as much as I could (a program called briss makes
this easy). But I think modern eReaders are much better and might be able to
zoom in on PDFs.

Every other format I came across I converted to ePub using Calibre, which is
fairly painless.

------
skywhopper
The short version is that physical books have a much better user interface
than electronic books by almost every criterion. Part of this is because of
counterproductive DRM restrictions, but software and hardware limitations
ensure that many uses of books, especially textbooks, fall far short in any
electronic format.

We take for granted, or are just unaware of, many of the ways in which
physical interaction with objects adds to the human experience of using them.
Sense memory/muscle memory/spatial memory can all play a role in absorbing the
content of the book, as can the physical interaction required to turn pages.
For reference work, things like tabbed pages or over-printed index points or
even just the ability to flip through the book or a section of the book at a
glance has no equal in electronic form.

~~~
TillE
I'm a huge fan of the Kindle for your typical linear fiction. It has many
advantages over a stack of paperbacks.

For any other kind of book, e-readers are an unsolved problem in terms of both
hardware and especially software. I'm convinced that it's possible to make
some really excellent textbook-oriented software (for a large-ish tablet
device), but it certainly doesn't exist yet.

------
tempestn
I vastly prefer ebooks for pleasure reading. I read them on my phone (white
text on black background with the brightness waaaay down). It's great because
I can read anywhere - in many places that I normally couldn't, because 1) I
always have the book with me, 2) I only need one hand (in fact even that only
occasionally since you can set the 'book' down without having to go to great
lengths to keep it open), and 3) I can read in the dark without disturbing my
wife.

That said, I would never want to try to study from an e-textbook. All
reference books I still buy in print. You would think with their
searchability, ebooks would have an advantage there, but I've always just
found it too awkward trying to jump between sections. It's much easier to have
a mental model of where information resides in a physical book than a digital
one.

~~~
murphm8
What app do you use to read the books?

~~~
tempestn
I use the Kindle app, but more due to inertia than anything else.

------
jkot
Lovely. Just a few points:

\- Reading is only problem in crappy screens. When 14" e-paper becomes norm,
paper books will be obsolete

\- As children I almost broke my back, because I had to carry 10 kg of books
every day. Even today I still walk funny.

\- In Ireland some schools banned wheeled school bags because of some school
uniform nonsense.

\- It is impossible to buy some digital books. You can only rent some DRM
nonsense. If you want to use book for decade or longer, you must buy print

\- in many professions textbooks are major (sometimes only) study cost. Good
gatekeepers to keep poor out.

\- for some reasons it is illegal to buy textbook from India in US.

~~~
ashark
> \- Reading is only problem in crappy screens. When 14" e-paper becomes norm,
> paper books will be obsolete

Many of my books would suck in ebook form, no matter how big the screen is.
Color, predictable layout so text, meta-text, and diagrams/images can be laid
out sensibly and helpfully, and having two pages visible at a time are
important for some books.

A good 14" e-ink screen won't make books obsolete. It'll take some much larger
advances in technology and in standards (ha ha, good luck) for ebook readers
to match paper books.

~~~
rpedroso
Typesetting differences between different devices is a problem that needs to
be solved for e-books to become feasible in classroom settings, book club
settings, etc. If a group wants to discuss a particular scene, argument,
metaphor, etc., it's important to be able to point to a page number -- ebooks
make this tricky.

The typesetting problem also ties into the navigation problem. There are some
books in my area of study that I make use of with great frequency (e.g. Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason, Wittgenstein's Tractatus). For the most part, if you
ask me to jump to a section, I can get there (within a dozen pages or so) just
by opening up the book to the right location. The TOC in something like Adobe
Reader do this effectively, but I haven't seen an e-reader that makes jumping
to sections as quick.

Annotation is another tough problem. In one particular copy of Plato's Meno, I
have a series of diagrams attempting to work out a geometry problem posed in a
somewhat controversial passage [1]. Some e-readers have made advancements with
text annotations, but nothing I've gotten my hands on comes close to paper
(yet).

I don't think these problems are insurmountable, but I agree with 'ashark that
a 14" e-ink screen won't suffice to make books obsolete until certain problems
are solved.

Even then, I enjoy having a large bookshelf packed with books. Call me old
fashioned, but I love the smell of old books :)

[1]
[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/635623?sid=21105440821...](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/635623?sid=21105440821771&uid=2&uid=4)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You're old fashioned. I used to write book reviews, and for a couple of years
I literally got boxes of books from publishers every week.

After a while it got insane. The local charity shops and libraries hated me on
sight.

Schools wouldn't touch the leftovers. I still have no idea why.

I kept a few thousand for the house, and the rest ended up in the wood burner.

Ebooks would have been _much_ more practical.

The flip side of paper is the way that entire forests are laid waste. A print
run of a million - not unusual for a best seller - will clear cut a huge area.

Then the pulp has to be bleached, which is a nasty process.

Eventually most of that paper simply gets thrown away.

The whole process is incredibly, stupidly _wasteful._

~~~
rpedroso
I won't deny that I'm old-fashioned :)

The environmental impact of paper vs e-books is something I had not
considered, but the effects of producing e-readers is still non-zero. I'd
believe someone if they told me the impact was less than paper books though.

I'll also admit that e-books are more practical in some contexts. For
instance, I prefer taking my kindle out for casual reading on the beach or in
the park -- navigating the book, annotating, etc, aren't big issues for
pleasure reading.

In academia, there is also another advantage to e-books: an e-book never
really goes out of print. In my second year of college, I had to order an
expensive copy of Gaston Bachelard's _La formation de l 'esprit scientifique_
from the UK because it was out of print in the US.

I look forward to a day when e-book annotation will suffice.

------
Someone1234
I'm going to focus on textbook (because it makes my point easier). To me there
are three distinct issues with digital books:

\- Backlit displays give you eye strain and make reading less pleasant. This
can be solved with eInk but then you lose colour diagrams/graphs and even the
largest eInk device is smaller than a single textbook page (and the layout
within textbooks is key to understanding in some cases).

\- Saving multiple pages is very painful. Almost all ebook readers (both apps
and devices) allow you to save your current page, close the "book," and then
continue later. Very few allow you to tag multiple pages with "sticky notes"
and then jump back to any of them.

\- Some people like to highlight their $100 textbooks or to write notes on the
pages. I am not one of these people, however that is a legitimate argument
against buying the digital book. You rarely can do this type of thing.

Unfortunately eInk was here to save us, and I think as a technology it hasn't
really succeeded. It gained popularity for a brief period, but then the iPad
got popular and people just decided to read on the device they already own
(and then give up, and buy paper copies because it was so unpleasant).

So unless someone invents an RGB eInk device, I think we'll be stuck with
either paper books or terrible backlit flicky displays forever. Too bad if you
ask me.

~~~
stdbrouw
Hm, I'm going to guess that the Kindle is probably the most popular e-reader,
and it has the ability to add notes, highlights and bookmarks, both with the
hardware device and in the apps for tablets and computers. It also doesn't
have the eye strain issue.

Actual remaining issues:

* complex layouts get messed up, as you mention

* it's not very easy to leaf through an ebook and to quickly jump from section to section

That said, I still read 90% of my course materials on my Kindle, Kindle app
for OS X or Mendeley. For all its disadvantages, having a digital overview of
all of your annotations is a godsend when doing research or studying for an
exam.

For that same reason, I don't take paper notes anymore: while convenient,
often they get lost, you can't search through them and you can't edit them.

~~~
mszyndel
> it's not very easy to leaf through an ebook and to quickly jump from section
> to section

This is available on Kindle for quite some time now. Tap on top to show menu
and then slide you finder on bottom bar - preview of pages will show and you
can look back and forth without changing your current position.

~~~
stdbrouw
It's an improvement, but not nearly as easy to use as leafing through a
physical book. I'm thinking of the use-case where you're solving exercises in
one place but also want to sometimes go back to the theory or to a reference
section in the back.

~~~
taeric
This is probably as easily solved by just having multiple ereaders, honestly.

~~~
lione
Have an ereader for every book! It's flawless!

~~~
taeric
Within reason, it probably is cheaper and more workable for many people to
just have two or three ebook readers than the myriad of physical books and
shelving necessary for them.

Additionally, for textbook style things, it was already common to have
"student handbooks" that go along with the book.

------
Htsthbjig
I digitalized all my book collection long, long time ago, and DRM FREE ebooks
are much better than anything on paper.

Unfortunately there is no legal software solution that reaps the benefit of
digital, because what makes digital great, like an open interface to access
the data, makes it easier to copy.

Reading on a 55 inches OLED in portrait mode, with black background, letters
in green or white is gorgeous. I can search the book, make it to talk me,read
on multiple columns like a newspaper, read different books at the same time(in
order to reference one from another) or have an open browser.

But for using digital you have to stop trying to emulate paper.

~~~
lmm
I'm amazed the publishing industry has managed to completely ignore the
lessons of the music industry. In the meantime, piracy gets you a version that
does it right.

------
Spooky23
It's pretty obvious... reading books digitally is a lousy experience. IMO, the
only people who benefit from e-books are the people publishing them, except
for reference books.

The textbook cost problem is about the implicit corruption of the process
promulgated by publishers and colleges.

My nephew has the 45th edition of some Accounting 101 textbook, which is
almost exactly the same as the 20th edition that I had a long time ago. It
costs like $150, which is criminal. This situation exists because everyone is
getting their pound of flesh from the poor students.

~~~
Someone1234
It exists for one reason and one reason only:

Because the professors, department, and college cause it to happen. They
choose to assign a $150 textbook instead of picking something else, they
choose to likely get kickbacks from the publisher (e.g. free lesson materials,
free teachers edition, free grading, etc) and they choose to ignore their duty
as guardians to educational access. They're sellouts.

Publishers and authors are designed to make as much money as possible. It is
their legal and moral imperative. It isn't even the publisher who forced you
to buy that $150 textbook, they didn't assign it, they didn't fail to include
it in tuition, they just sold it in the open market.

I want John Oliver to do a bit on this topic. However as long as people
continue to blame the publishers it will never get fixed. If people started
[correctly] blaming the schools/professors/departments/etc and actually
started to complain in that direction, things would change for the positive.

Think about who actually forced you to buy that book, and that is the answer
for who you should be mad at. I'd honestly like to see legislation that forced
public colleges and universities to include all books in the tuition, that way
students can compare the relative cost because two classes (e.g. one assigning
$150 books, and one assigning $50 books).

~~~
bsder
> Because the professors, department, and college cause it to happen. They
> choose to assign a $150 textbook instead of picking something else, they
> choose to likely get kickbacks from the publisher (e.g. free lesson
> materials, free teachers edition, free grading, etc) and they choose to
> ignore their duty as guardians to educational access. They're sellouts.

I'm offended ... I'm still waiting for my kickback from the publishers for the
books I choose for my classes ... anyhow ...

If I choose that expensive textbook for my class, it's probably because I
think you need the book even _outside_ of my class.

Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest--"Introduction to Algorithms" is about $100. Yes,
it's expensive, but it's an important book for your professional reference. A
programmer better have a copy of that on the bookshelf.

And before you get too huffy about your lecturers, you might want to consider
that anyone lecturing in your class who isn't full-time, tenure tack is
probably getting about $5,000 for one class for the semester (I know this to
be true for UCal system and Stanford). Given the amount of time it takes to
teach, working at McDonald's probably pays better.

~~~
Spooky23
Back in the 90s, a big controversy on my campus was the Barnes and Noble
takeover of the school bookstore, which had previously been run by the
university's auxiliary services (3 old ladies + work/study students). Part of
the deal was something like $5 million annual pledge to the university's
struggling athletic program. (Ie. The kickback)

In other cases, the corruption was more blatant... Like the department where
all books were authored by professors in the department.

In my example, I used the accounting textbooks as an egregious example,
because accounting 101 is pretty cut and dry, and a professor time traveling
from 1980 could teach it today. Engineering is a little different, and the
textbooks tend to be more niche and have more lasting value. There's a
difference between a technical reference and s $75 "Mercury Reader" that may
largely consist of public domain works.

------
gdubs
Books provide a great tactile experience. Books are immediate. But the real
difference? Books make you slow down.

This is a great example of "The Medium is the Message". The words are the
same, the information is the same, but the experience is completely different.

There's just something about screens. I think we're already seeing a trend
among people who spend a lot of time around screens: we're starting to try to
find ways to spend less time around screens.

It's not just the distractions -- the alerts, the temptations to switch over
to a web browser. Though, certainly that's part of it. No, I think it's more
about the medium itself. Just something about screens that's an entirely
different experience.

Not saying screens are bad -- I love screens :) But, I think we're seeing a
desire to find balance via slower mediums. For me it's cooking, reading,
bicycling, etc.

~~~
the_af
Interesting! Hadn't thought about the psychology of it all, but it rings true
for me: when I'm reading a book, I seldom put it down every few minutes, like
I do when reading the same book on a screen.

------
panzagl
Meh, wait until they have to move house a couple of times, or their kid wants
a piano so they go from a nine foot library bookcase to a couple of Billys
from Ikea.

Anyone who is worried about not 'owning' their books is more than welcome to
accompany me on my biannual trip to the Friends of the Library donation desk.
I guess I lose the tax credit on my ebooks, but at least I've gotten to keep
them so far.

~~~
colmvp
I'm glad I'm not the only one.

I moved to Kindle a year ago and haven't looked back.

For technical and art books, yes I'll still buy the paper version. But for
non-fiction, fiction, saved long-form articles, and magazines... I'll take
Kindle any day of the week. The ability to bring countless sources of content
with me anywhere I go or at my bedside while saving incredible amounts of
space in my house is a godsend.

I'm a designer, but perfect layout and typography of printed layout is far
less important to me than the ease of consuming the content itself.

~~~
panzagl
And it's not like the majority of books people own are that great as physical
objects anyway- grab a random hardback from the fifties and compare it to any
hardback you're likely to grab at Costco or B&N- the quality isn't even close.

------
serve_yay
This doesn't say anything about the actual e-books themselves, which are
frequently terrible. Not only that, they're often priced at parity with the
physical books, which takes some real gall.

I really do mean they're terrible, publishers would never release the print
equivalent of the crap they put in e-books. Terrible typesetting, breaking
important parts of books, no ability to handle things like accented
characters, it's embarrassing stuff. Or, it should be, but publishers are so
focused on not being subsumed by the onslaught of technology that it seems to
be a low priority.

------
smchang
It seems like people constantly overlook the differences between reading
textbooks versus reading novels. When reading for academic purposes (including
novels for say English majors), the pattern of reading is often non-linear.
People may read through it once or more times, but the majority of the time is
spent skipping around, constantly flipping back and forth trying to find the
relevant passages for reference. Personally, this type of reading is a very
visual experience for me, I remember where a certain equation or figure was on
the page and can quickly flip to it even if I don't remember the exact
contents. Something that is not possible in the same way digitally.

On the other hand, I would guess that when most people read novels
recreationally, they are reading in a linear fashion. There is a much smaller
need for readers to constantly be flipping to different sections of the book
while reading a novel.

There is also the issue of where people read. For textbooks, it is pretty easy
to set a large book down on a table or desk at home, in a dorm room, or in a
library. It is much harder to do so if you read primarily on a train or bus
during rush hour or at a bus stop.

~~~
omaranto
Maybe people overlook the differences because few people actually do both
kinds of reading?

------
witty_username
I, for one, prefer a e-book to a hard to navigate book.

* And I presume I'm a "digital native" (whatever that means) since I'm 13.

~~~
Jtsummers
For fiction or for non-fiction?

And if non-fiction is it still more of a narrative (like a history text or
biography) or is it a technical text which bounces around more?

If it's a technical text that bounces around, there's hardly any easier tool
for navigating a math or science text than flipping through the pages until a
diagram or formula that matches something like what you're looking for pops
up. The cool thing is, the human visual system is good enough you can spend a
fraction of a second on each page flipping through it like a flip book. You'll
realize you passed it about 20 pages too late, so you repeat the search a
little slower over the most recent pages until you find what you wanted.

On a computer with a PDF you may be able to do this, but no e-reader flips
through pages this quickly, and most tablets start choking when you flip
through hard to render texts too quickly.

And this doesn't even count the ability to markup a textbook, or slip loose
sheets of paper in with your notes. My physics and calculus texts in college
ended up being about 80% textbook and 20% engineering paper by the end of the
semester. Annotations on e-books are certainly possible, but the UI is far
more cumbersome than just a pen in hand.

~~~
witty_username
For me technical text is the exact place where e-books are preferable. I can
easily add bookmarks and swap around places and Ctrl+F phrases.

------
dsr_
I read on my phone. It has a 5.2" display at better than 400dpi. I can read in
the dark, in daylight, and I can do it one-handed while standing up on a bus
or train. When I'm only reading on it, I get about 8 hours of battery life.

I read about 200 books a year on my phone. I prefer it...

except for comic books, technical books, and art books. In those, the layout
or the physical format requires something much bigger, and still 300dpi or
higher. That's very expensive right now.

------
ghostly_s
Sent to my Kindle (via Pocket->custom Calibri script->Kindle email) to read
later.

~~~
colomon
Hmmm, I usually just use "Send to Kindle" (by Klip.me) for web pages. Though I
do use Calibre->Kindle email to handle books not in the Kindle ecosystem.

------
_cudgel
I didn't see mention of the thing that always bothered me most: eye strain.
I'm not sure if this is still an issue with newer "Retina"-style displays, but
if I recall correctly, the human eye will constantly try and refocus on
individual pixels while reading online. This comes across to the reader
initially as distractedness, and after prolonged periods, eye strain.

~~~
lucian1900
That is not at all an issue with an eink display. It's almost exactly like
paper.

------
taylorwc
I think there is a distinction between textbooks and literature. Reading the
average novel on a Kindle or tablet is not hard or distracting... Reading a
Statistics textbook is darn near impossible. This article spends a lot of time
focusing on college students and textbooks/required reading.

------
Shivetya
Myself I am in between. I read primarily on a Kindle. However if I am trying
to find quotes, or additional subject matter, I go to the net for a quick
search resulting in many resources. When it comes to magazines I still keep
them around and use them more than the many complimentary electronic versions
that are offered as I default back to open searches using google/bing over the
online magazine.

I guess where I am going is, for mostly static information a book and magazine
are great but for immediate need the power of search engines trumps all
including many electronic versions of books and magazines which don't offer
the same ease of use

------
Eridrus
I have the exact opposite experience. I love my Kindle paperwhite.

I can now get books right when I'm excited about them, not a few days later.

I can take a pile of books with me everywhere I go and read them when I have
some spare time. Public transport and traveling are the common ones.

I'm also quite sick of carting around the physical books I've already
collected every time I move.

I will admit to being disappointed by lending facilities in my kindle, but
it's a minor quibble in my eyes.

I feel a little sorry for bookstores, which I really enjoy browsing, but I'd
buy ebooks from them if I could.

------
dangerlibrary
Penny Arcade has a good pitch: [http://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2009/03/09/](http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/03/09/)

------
xroche
> school systems are buying millions of tablets and laptops for classroom use

Taking notes on a laptop has been found to be ineffective compared to writing:
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-
secret-...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-
take-notes-with-a-laptop/)

This is why laptops in classrooms is utterly retarded.

~~~
Someone1234
> utterly retarded

Do you really think it is appropriate to be using the term "retarded" as a
derogatory term in 2015? Why not just bring out "gay" and the n- word too if
while you're at it...

I actually agree with you regarding laptops and tablets in the classroom (and
I work in technology). I just find such language pretty distracting to an
otherwise great point and interesting link.

~~~
xroche
Ah, political correctness...

~~~
Someone1234
Ah, poor vocabulary...

English has a bunch of words meaning "stupid" or "foolish." For example:
absurd, asinine, brainless, cockamamy, crazy, daffy, daft, dazed, deficient,
dense, dim, dippy, doltish, dopey, dotty, dull, dumb, dummy, fantastic,
fatuous, feebleminded, foolish, futile, gullible, half-baked, half-witted,
harebrained, idiotic, ill-advised, ill-considered, imbecilic, imprudent,
inane, incautious, indiscreet, injudicious, insane, insensate, irrational,
irrelevant, jerky, kooky, laughable, loony, loser, ludicrous, lunatic, mad,
meaningless, mindless, moronic, naive, nerdy, nonsensical, nutty, obtuse,
pointless, preposterous, puerile, rash, ridiculous, senseless, short-sighted,
shortsighted, silly, simple, simpleminded, slow, sluggish, stolid, stupefied,
stupid, thick, thick-headed, trivial, unintelligent, unreasonable, unthinking,
unwise, wacky, weak, witless, zany

~~~
acheron
And several of those were formerly clinical descriptions of "mental
retardation" \-- "idiot" and "imbecile" for two -- exactly the same as
"retard". The only difference is that they're further back on the euphemism
treadmill.

You can argue against the use of certain words if you'd like, but you can't
pretend that it's anything other than political correctness.

~~~
Someone1234
It shows a lack of professionalism, a poor vocabulary, and a general
disrespect towards the mentally handicapped. It just isn't up to the standards
that people expect in this day and age.

You seem to think "political correctness" is some kind of dirty term, rather
than just accepting that times change, and society has moved on. Homosexuals
are no longer seen as a negative (per "gay" as a derogatory) and the mentally
handicapped are no longer seen as being idiots or fools (per "retard" as a
derogatory).

It surprises me that some people simply do not appreciate this and how their
use of language reflects on them as people.

~~~
blumkvist
/me tips his fedora.

------
taeric
Just having fun with the title. Why are digital natives preferring non digital
for reading? Because there are no true digital natives, yet. At best we are
all digital immigrants.

------
cbd1984
The article has a false premise.

