Seeing the Forest Past the Trees (or Something Like That)

There's a narrative the publishing industry loves to revisit every few years and it’s usually with the breathless urgency of someone who just discovered their pants are on fire. “Print is dying. Digital is the future. Adapt or perish.”

And every few years, the data tells that narrative to sit the f*ck down.

The Pew Research Center's latest survey on American reading habits, published in April 2026, is the most recent bucket of cold water on the "print is dead" crowd. Based on a survey of over 8,000 U.S. adults conducted in October 2025, the findings tell a story that should reshape how authors, publishers, and creators think about where and how they sell their books.

⚰️ Pew Research Says Print Isn't Dead

Seventy-five percent of U.S. adults say they've read at least part of a book in the past 12 months. That number has barely budged since Pew first started tracking the question in 2011. Reading isn't declining. The sky is, in fact, still overhead.

But here's where anyone who sells books should really perk up: 64% of American adults read a print book in the past year. That's more than double the 31% who read an e-book, and well ahead of the 26% who listened to an audiobook.

Print is not just surviving. It is still the dominant format. At Lulu Press, Inc., we see that trend growing every year, with over 4 million books printed and shipped in 2025, compared to 3.6 million in 2024.

According to the Association of American Publishers data for 2024:

Within Trade, the Hardback and Paperback formats together accounted for nearly three-quarters of revenue (72.9%), maintaining their position as the most popular formats with $7.7 billion in revenue each. On a year-over-year basis within Trade, the Hardback format was up 3.6% and the Paperback format climbed 3.0%.

And yes, just to appease my podcasting co-host, Lauren Vassallo, ebook readership has grown. It has increased from 17% in 2011 to 31% in 2025 (undoubtedly, due to the rise in romance and fantasy reading). Audiobooks have more than doubled, from 11% to 26%. But both of those growth curves have been trending somewhat horizontally since 2021. The digital surge has leveled off. Print, meanwhile, continues to command the majority of reading behavior today.

For creators and publishers who've been chasing the digital-first dream at the expense of their physical product strategy, this should be a wake-up call.

👀 Seeing the Forest Past the Trees (or Something Like That)

Here's the part most people will miss if they just scan these numbers and go back to doomscrolling their way to lunchtime:

If nearly two-thirds of American adults read a physical book last year, the question isn't whether demand exists. Duh, it clearly does. The question is...who captures the economics of that transaction?

In the traditional model, the answer is a long chain of intermediaries. When a book sells, the retailer takes their cut, the distributor takes theirs, and the publisher absorbs their margin. And the person who actually wrote or produced the book? They get what's left. Which, for most authors, is somewhere on the spectrum between disappointing and depressing.

But when you sell a print book directly to a reader the math changes dramatically. You set the price. You own the customer relationship. You keep the margin. And if you're using print-on-demand fulfillment, you eliminate the inventory risk that has traditionally made direct sales impractical for independent creators and publishers.

This is the “meet-cute” moment that the Pew data inadvertently spotlights: persistent, dominant consumer demand for physical books, meeting an infrastructure layer that now makes it possible to fulfill that demand without warehouses, minimum print runs, or retail gatekeepers. (Lauren will be proud of me for using "meet-cute" properly.)

📦 99 Problems But Fulfillment Ain’t One

For years, the biggest barrier to selling print books directly wasn't demand, but rather, It was fulfilling that demand.

Print books are heavier than ebooks. They're expensive to store. They require careful packaging and reliable shipping. For an independent author or a small publisher, the idea of managing inventory, packing orders, and handling returns was mostly terrifying. It was so much easier to hand all of that to Amazon or a traditional distributor and accept the bullshit margins.

But that calculus has fundamentally shifted. Modern print-on-demand infrastructure has matured to the point where a single book can be printed, packed, and shipped to a reader's door without the creator ever touching inventory. The quality gap that once existed between POD and offset printing has narrowed to the point of irrelevance for most applications. And the economics now decisively favor the direct seller.

Consider the math: a book that retails for $18.99 on a major marketplace might net the author $3-4 after platform fees, printing costs, and distribution margins. That same book, sold directly through the author's own storefront and fulfilled via a print-on-demand partner like Lulu, might net $10-12. Same book. Same reader. Radically different economics.

And because there's no inventory to purchase upfront, the risk profile is essentially zero. Books aren’t printed until someone buys them. Books aren’t shipped until they’re printed. The entire model is demand-driven. And given what the Pew data tells us about the scale of demand for physical books, this is a pretty compelling position to be in.

🏚️ Don’t Build On "Rented Land"

There's another dimension to this that goes beyond economics, and it's one that the Pew data underscores indirectly.

When 75% of adults are reading books and 64% prefer print, you're looking at a massive, stable market. But if your only path to that market runs through someone else's platform, you don't actually own your relationship with those readers. You're building on rented land.

Marketplace algorithms change. Search rankings shift. Fee structures get restructured (always upward, somehow). And through all of it, you never get the one thing that actually compounds in value over time: a direct relationship with the person who bought your book.

Direct-to-reader sales solve this. When someone buys from your website, you get their email address. You learn what they bought, when they bought it, and if you're paying attention, why they bought it. You can follow up. You can offer the next book. You can build a backlist business that generates revenue for years, not just during a launch window.

The Pew data shows us that readers are there and they're buying print. The strategic question is whether you're going to meet them on your terms or someone else's.

📊 Follow the Yellow Brick Data Road

The creators and publishers who are paying attention to data like this aren't debating whether print matters. They're building infrastructure to sell it directly.

They're setting up Shopify stores and WooCommerce sites in record numbers. They're connecting those storefronts to print-on-demand fulfillment APIs that handle production and shipping seamlessly. Lulu's API, for instance, integrates directly into any website (or use our Shopify & WooCommerce plugins) so that a reader's order triggers printing and delivery without manual intervention. They're treating their book business the way any modern DTC brand treats their product line: owned audience, owned storefront, owned data, outsourced logistics.

This isn't a bet on some theoretical future. It's a response to what the data already shows. Print dominates. The audience is massive. And the tools to serve that audience directly, without all of the overhead, exist right now.

The Pew Research Center didn't set out to write a business case for direct-to-reader print book sales. But that's essentially what they've done.

For anyone who writes, publishes, or sells books, the implication is clear: the demand for print isn't going anywhere. The only question is whether you're positioned to capture it on your own terms, with your own margins, your own customer relationships, and your own brand. Or whether you're content to let someone else own that connection.

Data cited in this article is from the Pew Research Center survey of 8,046 U.S. adults, conducted October 6-16, 2025, and published April 9, 2026, and from the 2024 AAP StatShot of Publishing Revenues published August 26, 2025.