Walk into any café and you’ll see the same small contradiction play out: someone scrolling through a phone one moment, then pulling a paperback out of a bag the next, as if switching from a snack to an actual meal. E-readers have been commercially available for close to two decades. Smartphones put an entire library in every pocket. And still, print keeps winning.
What the newest numbers actually show
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2025, 64% of U.S. adults had read a print book in the past 12 months, compared with 31% who had read an e-book and 26% who had listened to an audiobook. Print is the only format a majority of Americans use. That share has declined slightly since 2011, when it stood at 72%, while e-book and audiobook use have both grown substantially over the same period — audiobook listening has more than doubled. But the growth has flattened: there’s been little movement in any of the three formats since Pew last asked the same questions in 2021.
The overall pattern is stable in an era that has otherwise reorganised how people watch, shop, and communicate. Three-quarters of U.S. adults say they’ve read all or part of a book in the past year — a figure that has barely moved since Pew first asked the question in 2011, regardless of what device happened to be in their hand at the time. The survey also found real differences by education and age: adults with a bachelor’s degree are far more likely to read in any format than those with a high school education or less, and adults under 30 are the heaviest users of e-books and audiobooks specifically. But even among the youngest, most digitally native readers, print still leads.
Convenience didn’t turn out to be the deciding factor
The stalled growth is the more interesting number, because convenience was supposed to settle this question years ago. An e-book downloads in seconds, costs less to produce, and never runs out of stock. If reading behaviour followed the same logic that reshaped music and video — where the more convenient format eventually swallowed the incumbent one — print should be a niche product by now, the way vinyl is to music. Instead, digital formats have carved out a real but bounded share of the market and stopped there, which suggests something other than convenience is doing the deciding.
Comprehension research points to a real mechanical difference
One answer comes from reading researcher Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger, whose study of 72 tenth-graders found that comprehension was measurably worse when students read the same texts on a computer screen instead of on paper, for both fiction and factual material. Mangen’s explanation isn’t nostalgia.
It’s the physical experience of a bound object: readers can feel how much of a book remains, flip back to check something, and build what she calls a mental map of the text’s structure. A scrollbar or a page counter gives the same information abstractly, and that abstraction turns out to cost something at the level of memory and comprehension, not just preference.
Mangen’s follow-up work found the effect was strongest for longer texts, where readers need to move back and forth to track relationships between earlier and later sections — exactly the kind of navigation a bound book makes almost automatic and a screen makes deliberate. Handwriting research from her collaborator Jean-Luc Velay points the same direction: the body’s involvement in an activity changes how the brain encodes it, not just how pleasant the activity feels.
What screens actually train readers to do
Linguist Naomi Baron’s research, collected in her book Words Onscreen, adds a second layer: it isn’t only that screens comprehend worse, it’s that they train a different kind of attention altogether. In her surveys of university students across several countries, the large majority said they concentrated best when reading on paper, and described digital reading sessions as prone to skimming, multitasking, and quick forgetting.
Baron’s argument is that this isn’t a personal failing so much as a habit the medium itself encourages — a phone is built to be interrupted, and a screen invites the eye to jump rather than settle. That distinction matters more than the print-versus-digital framing usually allows for.
The complaint readers have with e-books rarely turns out to be about the words on the page. It’s about the posture the device puts them in — one eye on the text, one on the notification bar.
Reading stays private even when everything else went social
The same Pew survey found that book clubs remain a minority pursuit: only 7% of U.S. adults say they took part in one in the past year, with women about twice as likely as men to do so.
That’s a useful data point against the idea that people are choosing print out of some collective, communal impulse.
Reading, for most people, is still something done alone, on their own schedule, without an audience. That may be part of what makes the format choice meaningful rather than incidental. A phone is built for interruption and display — notifications, shared screenshots, the awareness that someone might see what’s on the lock screen.
A paperback offers none of that.
Choosing it is one of the few remaining ways to opt out of being observed while taking in information, which may explain why the format has held its ground even as nearly everything else about how people spend their attention has moved onto a screen with a feed attached to it.
Why this matters beyond the reading stack
None of this means digital reading is a failure of will. Audiobooks in particular have grown for reasons that have nothing to do with comprehension — they fit a commute or a chore in a way a paperback doesn’t, and listening is a different cognitive task from reading altogether. But the print numbers are worth taking seriously by anyone who edits or produces long-form writing, because they say something about what readers are actually asking of a text when they choose to read it in depth: not just information, but a format that lets them hold still with it.
A manuscript that has been carefully edited for structure and pacing depends on a reader who can follow that structure across chapters, and that’s precisely the kind of reading a bound book still supports better than a feed of any kind. Writers who assume their work will mostly be read in fragments, between notifications, are making a different set of choices than writers who can count on a reader’s sustained attention — shorter sections, more signposting, less trust that a reader will hold a thread across twenty pages.
The paperback coming out of the bag after the phone goes back in a pocket isn’t sentiment. It’s a reader choosing the format that actually lets them pay attention, in one of the few areas of daily life where a person can still make that choice deliberately.
