It’s an accepted truth that in matters digital the British are a backwards people.  Their Internet competency trails that of Americans by a decade. With each instance of their technological quaintness we shake our heads and smile indulgently.

A recent poll confirms the archaic mentality of our cousins on the other side of the Big Pond. “Nearly three-quarters of Britons say that they will never totally migrate to a digital-only film or music subscription service,” reports Emma Barnett, Technology and Digital Media Correspondent for Telegraph.co.uk.  And “Seventy-three per cent of the Britons polled in a survey of over 1,000 consumers aged between 16 and 60 said that they could never see a time when they would move over to a 100 per cent digital-only music or film subscription model.” Another example of their antediluvian mindset: Given a choice, 75% of those polled would rather boot up a DVD than watch a streamed movie.

Most egregious of all is that 95% of those responding to the poll said that they prefer paper books over e-books.  Well, that tears it! If there is a more benighted race on the face of 21st century Earth we don’t know about it.

We must try to understand the values underlying this British perversity if for no other reason than they might yield some sociological benefits.  But more importantly, once we understand them it will be easier to convert the British to modern American values and expand the export market for our Nooks, Kindles and iPads.  So, the question is, do the British know something about paper that we don’t know?

A clue may be gleaned in an observation imparted to the Telegraph reporter by Shaun Hobbs, Home Server manager for HP Personal Systems Group UK and Ireland: “In this technologically driven age,” says Hobbs, “it is easy to get carried away and think that everybody is embracing digital and leaving physical behind. Our survey shows that this isn’t the case. Britons are on an evolutionary journey with media still being bought on multiple formats and enjoyed using a variety of devices. We’re not yet ready to give up the old ways of purchasing media.”

In the spirit of openmindedness we’ll grant that there might be some value in the old media. Perhaps Hobbs has been following the research of social scientists like Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, who wrote that “people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent… Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read.”

Or maybe Hobbs had delved into observations by Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, about the possibly negative impact of screen reading on children:  “No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain… My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).”

Or Hobbs might have read a comment by Professor Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction: “I’d much rather curl up in an easy chair with a paper book. It’s not only an escape into a world of literature but it’s an escape from my digital devices.”

Okay, we’re ready to concede  that digital books may be less immersive than printed ones, that they are far more distracting, that they may compromise reading speed, concentration and retentiveness in children, and that they are less beautiful, tactile and comfortable than paper.   But surely those drawbacks are not too high a price to pay for opening the lucrative British market to Yankee reading devices and an American way of life that is unquestionably the quintessence of civilization. American manufacturers simply must work harder to bring truth and e-books to this primordial, childlike society.

Richard Curtis