E-book reading in the United States reached its highest measured level in 2025: 31% of adults read an e-book in the past year, up from 17% in 2011, while 64% read print and 26% listened to audiobooks, per the Pew Research Center's survey of 8,046 U.S. adults conducted October 6–16, 2025, published April 9, 2026. The short version for screen-minded readers: digital reading keeps climbing, and print refuses to fall.
What exactly did the survey measure?
Pew asked a probability-based panel of 8,046 U.S. adults — drawn from the American Trends Panel and the SSRS Opinion Panel — what they had read in the previous twelve months. Overall, 75% read a book in some format. The format splits were 64% print, 31% e-book, 26% audiobook, and the trend table is the interesting part: print has hovered between 63% and 72% for fifteen years, e-books have drifted from 17% (2011) to 31% (2025), and audiobooks climbed from 11% to 26% over the same span, per Pew Research Center, April 9, 2026.
Who is reading on screens?
The e-book numbers skew hard by age and education, per the same report. Among adults under 30, 41% read e-books — nearly double the 23% among those 65 and older. College graduates read e-books at 42% versus 20% for adults with a high-school education or less, and the starkest line in the table belongs to Asian American respondents at 42% (English-speaking sample, as Pew notes). Audiobook listening shows the same age gradient: 32–33% for adults under 50, 13% for those 65+. If you picture the average e-reader buyer as young, educated, and phone-adjacent, the data agrees with you.
Does this mean screens have replaced print?
No — and that is the durable finding. Print's 64% share in 2025 sits within a couple of points of every measurement since 2012, while the number of Americans reading any book held at 75%. What changed is stacking: the gains in e-books and audio largely represent format addition, not substitution, with adults increasingly reading across two or three formats in a year. Volume tells a similar story of a broad middle: 38% of adults read one to five books in the past year, 13% read six to ten, and only 14% cleared twenty, per Pew Research Center, April 2026.
What does the study not tell us?
Device details. The Pew report measures formats, not hardware — it does not break out e-readers versus tablets versus phones, and it contains no screen-time data despite the format framing. Anyone claiming this survey shows Kindles beating phones (or vice versa) is extrapolating beyond the instrument. What it does establish is that dedicated digital reading is no longer niche behavior at a third of adults and still rising slowly.
Why does this matter if you own an e-reader?
Because the audience around you keeps growing. A 31% e-book adoption rate with the under-30 cohort at 41% suggests the next decade of buyers exists, which is what keeps manufacturers investing in better screens and front lights. The quiet headline, though, is stability: for all the format anxiety of the past fifteen years, most American readers still do both — and the e-ink device in your bag serves exactly that hybrid reader.
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