To be honest, I bought this book in a small, independent bookshop in San Francisco, where I spotted it while browsing a few days earlier, and not on Amazon. I read it as a paperback, not on my Kindle. And I guess that’s part of the point author David Sax was making: we still use analog for a lot of things and there’s evidence that we increasingly do so.

The sales of vinyl records are booming, physical notebooks (Moleskines are the best known) are selling like hotcakes, and bookshops (as well as physical books) are starting to make a comeback. Sax writes well, and travelled far and wide to meet the people who manufacture vinyl records, paper notebooks, even luxury analog watches made in the heart of the post-industrial wasteland of Detroit.

I was inspired to go out and buy yet another paper notebook (my favourite is Leuchtturm1917 rather than Moleskine), to get out a board game we bought last summer (Pandemic), and to buy my latest novel (The Boy on the Bridge) from a local bookshop rather than online.

Sax isn’t arguing that we all need to do this. He’s saying it’s happening anyway, and he wants to explain why.