50% of Brits now appreciate physical objects over digital as book and vinyl sales rise

Over the lockdown period, many of us have relied on our social media accounts as a way to connect with family and loved ones. Yet after over a year of digital-only interactions, Brits now spend more time using technology devices than they do sleeping, research from BBC suggests. This has now lead to digital burnout for many, with a physical boom here.

As our social media usage spiked over lockdown, data by Fujifilm has revealed that 50% of Brits now appreciate physical objects over digital. In particular, this study highlighted that there has now been a spike in people printing, framing and rediscovering the nostalgia that a physical photo can bring; with 41% believing that lockdown has fuelled a print revival. This can also be seen through the rise of print book sales and vinyl sales, with 200 million print books being sold and vinyl sales now highest since the early ’90s.

In a digitally-driven age, many of us have captured our milestones and major life events on our social media accounts. As such, we now all have a ready-made photo album, which has been carefully curated with our best photos with the best stories. PastBook – a unique instant photo book service – recognise the tangible value that a printed image can bring, from their ability to allow us to recall our memories to the childhood nostalgia they bring. As such, they allow us to create an image-based memoir of our social media images, preserving these moments in time forever. Using sophisticated technology, PastBook automatically creates a photo book of users’ best Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, Flickr, Picasa, computer, phone, or tablet photos captured over the past year, and instantly arranges them into a high-quality photo book.

Wouter Staatsen, CEO of PastBook, discusses why physical photos hold more value than digital:

“With 32.05 million Instagram users in the United Kingdom alone, our Instagram accounts have become embedded in our everyday life. As such, it is no surprise that over the lockdown period our social media usage increased as much as 47%, as social media was the only way for so many of us to connect with family and loved ones.

Today, with so many of us documenting every aspect of our lives – from engagements and gender reveals, to what we had for dinner – we now all have a digital photo album of our most important life memories, one which we can look back on in years to come. At PastBook, we create well-curated, stylistic logs of these social accounts and turn them into image-based memoirs – preserved forever. As such, we can now all rediscovering the nostalgia that a physical photo can bring.”