Here’s a confession I’m a little uneasy making: I still read the newspaper every day. Not an online version, but an old-school, physical newspaper — the New York Times lands on my lawn each morning. I won’t leaf through the pages until the evening, digging into stories I missed during the day’s chaotic rush. But while the same stories have been online for hours, sometimes a day or more, there’s something about the newspaper — its layout, its tried-and-true design, even its faint scent of dried pulp and ink — that makes the print product simpler, and more pleasurable, to devour. The Internet may be killing print papers, but it’s miles from replicating the experience of them.

So much energy is needed to tailor web pages to myriad platforms — rival browsers, news feeds, mobile devices and, soon, tablets — that there is little time left to do the harder work of making the experience of consuming news online an emotionally satisfying one. Which it isn’t yet. And that’s why Google’s Fast Flip announcement this week was so interesting. It’s time, the company was sayi