Print remains the most widely used book format among U.S. adults, but that finding is easier to overstate than it first appears.
In an October 2025 Pew Research Center survey of 8,046 adults, 64% said they had read a print book during the previous 12 months. Thirty-one percent had read an e-book and 26% had listened to an audiobook. Overall, 75% had read or listened to at least part of a book in some format.
What the survey does and does not show
Those categories overlap. A person could have used print, e-books, and audiobooks during the same year, so the figures do not measure a forced choice between formats. They also do not tell us which format people prefer or why they used one rather than another.
Pew’s trend data does show that print use remains more common. The share reporting a print book fell from 72% in 2011 to 64% in 2025, while e-book use rose from 17% to 31% and audiobook use rose from 11% to 26%. There was little change in any of the three measures between 2021 and 2025.
Separate research on reading medium
A different question is whether a reading medium affects comprehension. In a study of 72 tenth-grade students, reading researcher Anne Mangen and colleagues found lower comprehension scores after students read two texts on a computer screen rather than on paper. The study is relevant to how readers process text, but it was small, involved teenagers and computer screens, and did not investigate national format preferences.
Naomi Baron’s book Words Onscreen reports survey evidence that many students say they concentrate better on paper and are more likely to skim on screens. Self-reported concentration can help generate explanations, but it still does not establish why the adults in Pew’s survey used print.
The careful conclusion
Print has not been displaced by digital formats. That is a meaningful finding in its own right. Comprehension, habit, cost, access, convenience, and preference may all contribute, but the Pew survey did not rank those explanations. The strongest conclusion is therefore the simplest one: print remains the book format used by the largest share of American adults, even as digital and audio use have grown.
