Most of us have a favourite time for reading. Mine is around 11pm, when, slumping in an armchair with a newspaper or magazine (books are for holidays), has the effect of concluding the day with an ideal sense of completeness.

Last night, I read an interesting three-page magazine feature about buying a French property en viager. Essentially, in a viager purchase, the buyer pays the usually elderly seller a lump sum for their home (discounted against the property’s market value) and continues to pay a monthly ‘rent’, though ‘guaranteed pension’ might be a better phrase, throughout the seller’s lifetime.

Itis not dissimilar to acquiring a UK reversionary property, though there are several different types of viager, a variety of methods used to calculate a property’s value and a host of other matters including tax, repairs and indexation of the monthly ‘rent’ to consider.

I noted these and put the magazine aside for re-reading, so giving me time to mull over the various points raised in the article and the investment implications of acquiring property in this manner. Undoubtedly, I could have read about buying en viager online, though I would have absolutely no way of knowing whether the content I was eagerly absorbing was accurate. Nor, before I began, would I be assured it will be coherent and well-written.

Furthermore, reading the equivalent of three A4 pages of text on a computer screen, some of it quite complicated or having legal implications is, frankly, a chore.

The Internet can be a wonderfully useful tool, not least because it provides users with immediate news and information offered in bite-size pieces.

However, this makes it completely different from reading an in-depth feature in a specialised publication, pausing, thinking about what you have just read and perhaps putting it aside, or annotating an article with a view to returning to it later, or actually showing it to someone else.

Before this begins to sound like the ramblings of an unreconstructed Luddite, a category which I am minded to avoid, let me say there is an investment point to make.

The other day, I read (in a newspaper) that Emap, publishers of magazines such as Nursing Times and New Civil Engineer, is planning to change the frequency with which these and other titles are published from weekly to monthly or possibly make them online-only magazines.

This, according to the article, could sound the death-knell for the traditional magazine format as Emap wishes to position itself as a digital company.

It is perfectly entitled to do so, but I suspect Emap could be missing a trick here.

There are millions of folk, especially those of us who have turned 40, who are less than enamoured at having no option other than to read a magazine online. Many of us enjoy physically holding the publication, of folding the corner of a page over for future reference, of passing it to your spouse to share a laugh or a simultaneous shake of the head.

I understand why a publisher would change from a weekly to monthly production and focus on longer, more detailed, features, but my point is that if you want people to continue to read lengthier articles, you should provide them with the option of buying a physical copy.

Publishers who continue to recognise the enormous scale of demand for ‘hard copy’ publications could ultimately find they have a very large market to themselves. By the sound of things, this is not a market Emap wants to be in.