---
title: "Paper cuts and inky fingers"
date: "2026-10-13T14:26:33+01:00"
modified: "2026-10-13T14:26:34+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/paper-cuts-and-inky-fingers/"
post_id: 11006
---

# Paper cuts and inky fingers

![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/2B7768Y-1-edited.jpg)Credit: Alamy Stock PhotoA pile of vinyl records sits on the counter in my sister’s kitchen, Fleetwood Mac’s *Rumours* on the top. At first I assume she’s dug them out of the garage, but they’re all shiny and new; no dog-eared corners. Next to them is a brand new retro-style record player with its own carry case – and a jack to plug in and stream off one’s smart phone, too. The whole caboodle is in fact a 19th birthday present for my niece. Her request.

It’s a sign of what you may have been noticing anecdotally for some time. People – especially younger people – are seeking out analogue technology: physical books, DVDs and even stationery.

Some of the market is driven by the cold hard mathematics of modern “completist” fans – those who want to own the complete set. Think of Swifties collecting all the limited runs of Taylor Swift’s albums in vinyl, and bestselling romantasy books being released with several different beautiful hardback covers. (Check out the options for Rebecca Yarros’s “Empyrean” series, with stencilled edges.)

But industry data backs it up. Since last year, the British publishing industry weekly *The Bookseller* has been reporting a rise in sales of physical fiction books especially, but also of stationery and boardgames. Meanwhile, Waterstones said last August that they would open 10 new book stores to feed the growing market of Gen Z readers looking for non-screen entertainment.

There is certainly an irony there. According to James Daunt, CEO of Waterstones – who also oversees the revived Barnes & Noble bookseller in the US – a lot of this is being driven by social media, especially “BookTok”, a subcommunity on TikTok where influencers enthuse about the books they are reading.

I’m always wary of being merely nostalgic for the way things were. I’m of the generation who grew up writing letters, keeping a handwritten diary (since age 11 and still going 47 years later) and making mix tapes of my beloved vinyl albums. But I lived through the first great digital reset circa 1987 when we were told that CDs were infinitely superior (they weren’t) and a lot of people I know deeply regret throwing out all their records.

People started doing the same with DVDs when streaming services became big enough, but now realise that we are paying for films and shows we don’t own, that can disappear without warning.

I believe now that the most precious of analogue artefacts are in fact the most ephemeral: the torn and crumpled concert tickets and printed photographs that we used to keep in old cardboard boxes. I know, less paper waste, right? But how do you ever refresh an old memory from a QR code on your smartphone?

Perhaps we should be more disciplined, too, about clearing the thousands of duplicate photos on our smart devices, which require huge amounts of energy to fuel the servers storing them in the cloud.

For my niece’s generation, there’s a belief that the year 2000 was the peak moment of a happy balance between digital tech and human freedom. Her generation cherish the idea of reading physical books, owning the films you paid for, and SMS texting where you can’t see if someone has read your message. My 20-something daughter calls this idea “Y2K”, without any awareness of the term’s fearful associations in 1999, when it was thought that a computer glitch would induce global breakdown.

Today, as society at large grapples with the implications of AI infiltrating our lives, I like that “Y2K”, at least, now means something lovely and human-centric.