Read on paper, stay on top.

How my constant hunger for self–education led to a business idea.

I educate myself constantly. In the quickly evolving web industry where I work, it’s a must. You have to be informed about new trends and technologies in order to stay competitive. Failing to do so is failing to be a good and successful web expert. Tech industry’s development pace may be extreme, but as technology penetrates our lives on all levels, more businesses will depend on it and constant education will be necessary everywhere. So if you are not broadening your expertise every day now, you may soon find yourself obsolete.

In order to broaden your knowledge, you need to find good information sources. To me, it’s different publishers and bloggers writing about web, design and user experience. I have always followed dozen of magazines and blogs like A List Apart, The Great Discontent, Smashing Magazine, Cameron Moll, Swiss Miss,Information Architects, Dustin Curtis or 37signals.

That’s a lot of articles each week. Some short, some lengthy. Some important, some irrelevant. To me, it has always been a challenge how to consume them.

As web expert I appreciated every second spent off screen. My eyes were grateful for this relief and my mind was happy dealing with physical world instead. The same applied to reading. I didn’t mind reading a short article on screen, but I thoroughly considered reading every article that looked longer. Longer articles took away valuable time dedicated to real world.

And there was even bigger issue when reading online. A constant risk of loosing attention. Everything surrounding the article I was reading – other tabs in my browser, links in the article, ads around it, ICQ or e–mail client – were fighting to grab my attention and make me leave the article, loosing flow once and forever.

All this lowered my ability to absorb information effectively. In addition, studies proved that reading from screen is not as effective as reading on paper.

I desperately searched for solution. I found Kindle and it changed my flow. I have kept reading short articles on–line, but sent all the long interesting articles to my Kindle. The problem with Kindle is, that it’s only half way there. It’s screen is not lit, so it saves your eyes, but the articles usually lost their beauty and were completely ugly when sent to Kindle. On top of it, reading from Kindle always felt a little strange to me.

With expansion of mobile devices, services like Readability, Pocket or Flipboard appeared. They solve the ugly thing of Kindle, but they don’t allow you to read off screen. Reading on tablet or mobile is definitely less disruptive, but not distraction free and your eyes won’t love it (what are those tiny letters anyway?). At least not in the near future.

And then it hit me. I will build a service that allows people to read articles published online on paper. Because paper is good for your eyes, is distraction free, smells nice and is beautiful (really, go smell some book right now!). With Printividual you will be able to select the greatest articles you find and print them in a fine magazine format.

I set out to assemble a team. Next time I will tell you, how I met Dan and how we started to nourish this idea.