For years, e-books have been growing at a rapid pace. Kindles sold in the millions, and some started to wonder whether e-books would one day replace their analog counterparts completely.
Then last year, the sale of e-books curiously stopped growing, appearing to have hit a plateau, according to the Association of American Publishers.
In retrospect, it’s was obvious that digital text would never completely replace paper books, for the simple reason that readers overwhelming prefer real books to e-books.
In her book “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World,” linguistics professor Naomi Baron surveyed more than 420 students from the US, Germany, and Japan in 2010 and 2013 about their preferences for reading on paper versus a screen. In 2010, 92 percent of the students in the US, 77 percent of the students in Japan, and 95 percent of the German students said they preferred paper textbooks over e-books.
