And if I'm reading next to an open window and a breeze blows by, the chances that my paper will (at best) get blown around or (at worst) torn are pretty high, again due to how fragile the paper is.
The ink also gets all over everything when I touch it, so if I'm reading the paper at breakfast, I either eat ink when I pick up my toast or I'm washing my hands every time I turn a page.
Meanwhile, when I'm done reading the paper and want to return it to the pile for someone else to read, I have to carefully fold each section and each page and try to get them all back into a neat order, which never happens.
I also disagree on the "resolution is amazing" comment. Maybe my subscription is lower quality than others, but even in the New York Times, the pictures are awful, awful quality compared to digital.
And they're printed once a day, so if an important event happens at noon, I won't get to read about it until tomorrow morning.
And the worst part of it all? Printing all of these copies, every day, distributing them on trucks, and then they get thrown away. A newspaper is the absolute worst way to consume news. Absolute worst. Yeah it might feel nice to sit and read a newspaper, but part of me says that's nostalgia/wistfulness talking. Every piece of a newspaper is the worst way to present that particular thing, from ink to paper to organization to pictures to the news itself.
I don't like reading printed newspapers any longer either, but the one good thing about them is that they are printed once a day. News is not something that you need to know about instantly. The only things we need to know about in real time are existential threats. That is not news, that is an emergency broadcast or alert, which is not what news is for.
Have you ever noticed that when 24-hour cable news covers things in real time, it's mostly just waiting around and bullshiting until something happens, and then they are forced to provide incomplete information that is more often than not, wrong.
The whole idea of a newspaper is that it provides some time between an event and when you learn about it. That time is used by the newspaper to collect information, fact check and provide a more complete account of an event. They still get stuff wrong, but it's still far better than twitter, or cable or any real-time firehose.
Learning about something that happened yesterday also gives the reader the distance to contemplate and thing about what happened as well instead of jumping on twitter or facebook and making an ass of yourself before knowing all the facts.
It really threw me for a loop. Electronic texts are so pervasive in my life that I had half forgotten how to interact with a printed book. My automatic familiarity with print had faded enough that I was consciously aware of the properties of the medium. I was frustrated by the inability to zoom in on diagrams or copy and paste. The margins weren't big enough for my notes. There was no autogenerated list of highlighted passages. I felt like a child confronted with a VHS tape or a classic Gameboy.
I grew up obsessed with books. At the back of my desk drawer, there's a little envelope containing the membership cards for eleven different library services. For most of my life, I rarely went anywhere without a book to hand. I spent a large part of my adolescence digging through the dustier shelves of second-hand book shops. Still, I can't shake the feeling that print is largely obsolete. I don't feel nostalgic about books, I'm just frustrated that so few of them are available in digital format.
...I think I still have one of those in a junk-box somewhere.
Of course the lo-tech version is simply google the title and chances are you'll find the digital version of the article.
Recently, though, for one of the magazines I decided to get the CD version with PDFs (Servo Magazine); for the other two, it would be impossible to do this - Servo Magazine hasn't been out as long, and so it was easy to "catch up".
It will be digital and paper (comic book/pulp format to evoke the Amazing Stories feel), but we really wanted to get paper magazines out there for that same tangibility.
On the other hand, an e-ink device over a glossy mobile or laptop screen is something I was happy to restrain myself to.
Related, I renewed a print subscription to The Economist after spending the last ~5 years as a digital-only subscriber. I read so much more of the content when it's a physical item than by picking the articles with 'interesting' headlines.
And I find I can skim it with much leas distraction. Most pages have several articles, and it takes very little effort to scan headlines to see which ones to read.