If you’ve been thinking that you are a 20th-century dinosaur because you prefer paper books to e-books, think again.
A new study by the Pew Research Center has found that 65 percent of Americans surveyed had read a paperback or hardcover over the past year, compared to 28 percent who opted to read an e-book. Forty percent of those surveyed said they only read print books, while just 6 percent read e-books exclusively.
Audiobook use increased slightly from the previous year, up two percentage points from 2015. Amazon’s Kindle e-reader provoked a surge of e-book sales after it was released in 2007, but those sales have leveled off and have even declined in some areas.
“Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, while the typical (median) American has read 4 books in the last 12 months. Each of these figures is largely unchanged since 2011, when Pew Research Center first began conducting surveys of Americans’ book reading habits,” said the center in a press release.
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Overall, 73 percent of Americans 18 and over read a book over the past year, up one percentage point from 2015.
Lee Rainie, the director of internet, science and technology research for Pew Research, told the New York Times that the study demonstrated the staying power of physical books.
“I think if you looked back a decade ago, certainly five or six years ago when ebooks were taking off, there were folks who thought the days of the printed book were numbered, and it’s just not so in our data,” he said.
The phone survey of 1,520 American adults was conducted March 7-April 4 of this year.