Paper still prevails over e-books, according to new study

The vast majority of Americans continue to be enamored with print and have resisted the sirens call of e-books. Pew Research has just reported that 65% of U.S. residents have read a print book in the previous year, more than double the amount of people who have read an e-book (28%) or listened to an audiobook (14%).

In the past year, 65 percent of USA adults surveyed said they read a book in its printed form. Of those, 65 percent read a print book, 28 percent read an e-book and 14 percent listened to an audio book. The rate of Americans who read a book in a year’s time has remained consistent in the past few years.

As Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble launched their respective eBook readers in 2007 and 2010, there were many who rushed to predict that the printed book would soon be meeting an untimely end.

That number more than doubles the number of people who reported that they had read an e-book in the same time period (28 percent).

The Pew study, based on a telephone survey of 1,520 adults in the country from March 7 to April 4, reports that people are indeed using tablets and smartphones to read books. “They’ll read an e-book on a crowded bus, curl up with a printed book when they feel like that and go to bed with a tablet”.

That was one percent up from 2015, but below the 79 percent peak in 2011.

But how many readers are format purists? Forty percent of those surveyed said they only read print books, while just 6 percent read e-books exclusively.

Sixty-five percent of adults in the United States said they had read a printed book in the past year, the same percentage that said so in 2012.