Research institute · Pew Research Center
Pew 2025: 64% of US Adults Read Print, 31% E-books
Pew Research Center's October 2025 survey of 8,046 US adults finds print books are still the only format used by a majority, 64% read one in the past year, against 31% for e-books and a smaller share for audio. The print-vs-digital gap has barely moved since 2021.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 75% of US adults read all or part of at least one book in the past 12 months (October 2025).
- 64% read a print book in the past year, print remains the only format used by a majority of Americans.
- 31% read an e-book in the past year, up from 17% when Pew first asked in 2011.
- 72% read a print book in 2011, print's reach has slipped 8 percentage points over 14 years, not collapsed.
- 88% of US adults with a bachelor's degree read at least one book in the past year, against 60% of those with high school or less.
- 41% of US adults under 30 read an e-book in the past 12 months; a third or fewer of every older age group did.
- 42% of Asian-American adults read an e-book in the past year, well above the ~30% rate among White, Hispanic and Black adults.
- 25% of US adults read no books at all in the past 12 months.
- 14% read more than 20 books in the past year, a small but heavy-reading segment worth identifying.
- 7% of US adults took part in a book club in the past 12 months, women 10%, men 5%.
What the report covers
Pew Research Center surveyed 8,046 US adults between 6 and 16 October 2025, drawing the sample from the Center's American Trends Panel and SSRS's Opinion Panel. Respondents were asked which book formats they had used in the past 12 months, how many books they had read in total, and whether they had taken part in a book club. The same questions have been fielded in the same way since 2011, so the longitudinal picture is genuinely comparable.
The headline finding is stability, not disruption. The share of Americans reading any book in a given year has stayed close to three-quarters for 14 years. Print is still the only format a majority of adults use. E-books and audiobooks have both grown, e-book reach has roughly doubled since 2011 and audio more than doubled, but the slope flattened after 2021 and the print share remains comfortably ahead of either digital format.
Underneath the headline, the demographic skews matter more than the averages. Education is the single biggest predictor of reading anything at all (88% college, 60% high school or less). Age predicts format choice (under-30s lean digital, over-50s print). Race shows distinct patterns, with Asian Americans the most digital-leaning sub-group on e-books and White Americans the most likely to read print.
What this means for UK marketers
This is US data, so direct read-across to UK behaviour is not safe, but the directional signals tend to track, and the survey design is unusually strong. Three things stand out for UK marketers in publishing, retail, education, libraries and content brands.
Print is not the legacy channel digital-first thinking treats it as. Two-thirds of any addressable US adult market, and almost certainly a similar share of the UK adult market, given comparable book-market figures from the major analyst houses, still picks print over digital each year. For UK publishers, bookshops and education brands, that means catalogue print runs, physical merchandising, and tactile website design for publishers showing physical product remain commercially material, not nostalgic. The same applies to anyone selling adjacent to books, stationery, hobby kits, gift retailers, where the print-affinity audience overlaps heavily.
The digital channel is real but has stopped growing, and that changes the planning maths. If you have been pacing e-book budgets on the assumption that share will keep doubling every decade, this survey says it won't. The 31% e-book figure is barely different from 2021. UK digital marketing for book publishers should be planned as a steady share-of-format channel, not a growth lane that pays for everything else. Audio is the only format still on a clear upward path, worth considering whether audiobook-first acquisition and podcast sponsorships warrant a bigger slice of paid media budgets.
The under-30 and Asian-American skew on e-books is a targeting cue, not a content cue. If you are running paid social or programmatic for a publishing or content brand, the format mix in your creative should follow audience-segment behaviour rather than averages. Under-30 audiences see e-book and audio creative first; over-50 audiences see print and hardback as default. The book-club number (7%, women double men's rate) is small but high-engagement, a viable wedge for community-led marketing, particularly for fiction imprints and indie publishers willing to fund a Discord or Substack-style group around their list. The figures are the floor, not the ceiling, UK books-section coverage consistently overstates digital adoption versus what national surveys actually find.
How they got the data
Pew Research Center surveyed 8,046 US adults between 6 and 16 October 2025. Participants were drawn from the American Trends Panel (Pew's nationally representative panel of randomly selected US adults, recruited via address-based sampling) and from SSRS's Opinion Panel. Pew weights the combined sample back to the full US adult population so the topline figures represent national rather than panel behaviour.
The question wording on book reading and format choice has been held constant since 2011, which is why year-on-year and decade-on-decade comparisons in the report are meaningful rather than artefacts of survey design. Pew publishes its full questionnaire, topline tables and methodology document alongside the report, the link to those primary materials sits at the foot of the Pew page.
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From Pew Research Center · published 09/04/2026