Print is Dead

An independent guide to books, publishing and reading, on paper and on screens.

Print versus digital: what really happened to print

Newspapers, magazines and books all faced the same threat from the screen. They did not meet the same fate. The differences explain why the printed book is still here.

Last reviewed October 2026

At the start of the e-book era, the argument usually ran like this: music went digital, the CD collapsed, and books would follow. Text is even easier to digitise than sound, the logic went, and once a cheap, comfortable reading device existed, paper would go the way of the compact disc. Some version of that prediction appeared in newspapers, at industry conferences and on many blogs through the late 2000s, often under the same three words this site uses as its name.

It is worth looking at what actually happened, because the record is mixed in a way that tells you something about each medium. Print did not die. But different kinds of print had very different experiences, and the reasons have less to do with technology than with what each kind of print was for.

Newspapers: the product was never the paper

Newspapers took severe damage, and the reason is economic rather than technical. A printed newspaper bundled several things together: news, opinion, sport, listings, and above all classified and display advertising, which paid most of the bills. The web unbundled them. Classified advertising moved to dedicated sites, display advertising moved to search engines and social platforms that could target readers far more precisely, and news itself became something readers expected to get free.

The paper was never the point; it was the delivery truck for a bundle. When the bundle came apart, many papers lost the revenue that paid for their newsrooms. In the United States, researchers at Northwestern University's Medill school have tracked the closure of local newspapers and the growth of "news deserts", communities with little or no local news coverage, in an annual series of reports. The surviving papers mostly moved toward digital subscriptions, and many reduced how often they print.

The lesson for books is that newspapers did not decline because people stopped liking paper. They declined because the business model behind the paper stopped working.

Magazines: a split down the middle

Magazines had a more varied experience. General-interest and news magazines that depended on mass advertising suffered in much the same way as newspapers. Many titles closed, cut their frequency or became online-only. But specialist and luxury magazines, the ones that readers buy for the object as much as the information, did better. A thick, well-designed print magazine about design, food, fashion or a hobby offers something a feed does not: a finished, edited, beautiful thing you can keep. Independent magazines with small print runs and high cover prices have found a market precisely because they are physical.

That split, between print as a cheap carrier of information and print as a valued object, is the key to understanding books too.

Reference works: the clearest case of replacement

If any kind of print has genuinely been replaced, it is reference: encyclopedias, directories, timetables, maps and manuals. These are books you consult rather than read. You want one fact, fast, and you want it up to date. A searchable, constantly revised digital source does that job better than any printed volume can, and readers moved quickly once that source existed. Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, stopped printing its multi-volume set in 2012 and continued online.

When people predicted the death of the book, many were really extrapolating from this category. It was the wrong model for most of what publishers sell.

Books: why the bound volume held on

Books, and especially books read for pleasure, behaved differently from all three. E-books grew quickly after dedicated e-readers and then tablets became common around 2007 to 2010, and in some genres, such as romance and thrillers, a large share of reading moved to screens. But in the wider trade market, e-book growth levelled off, and print remained the larger format. The Association of American Publishers' StatShot reports, which collect revenue figures from publishers, have continued to show printed books bringing in more revenue than e-books. Several reasons stand out.

The reading experience was already good

Music moved to digital partly because digital was more convenient than the CD in nearly every way. For a novel, the printed book was already a very good interface: light, readable, durable and needing no power. E-readers matched it for comfort and beat it for portability and adjustable type, but they did not beat it so decisively that readers abandoned paper.

Books are gifts and objects

A large part of book buying is gift buying, and an e-book makes a poor present. Books are also displayed, collected, signed, annotated and passed on. Like the specialist magazine, the book is valued as an object, and publishers leaned into that with better design, special editions and attention to covers.

Prices did not collapse the way music prices did

In music, the single track and then the streaming subscription broke the album's price. In books, after an early period of very low e-book prices, the major publishers moved to the "agency" model in 2010, under which they, not the retailer, set the consumer price. The US Department of Justice later sued Apple and five publishers over how that switch was arranged, and in 2013 a federal judge found that Apple had conspired with the publishers to raise e-book prices. Whatever the legal outcome, the effect was that e-books never became so much cheaper than paperbacks that the decision was made for readers on price alone.

Some books simply work better in print

Illustrated books, cookbooks, children's picture books, art books, maps and books you flip back and forth through all suit paper. Fixed-layout e-books exist, but they are harder to make and read than the reflowable text that suits a novel. Our guide to e-book formats explains why.

What the "print is dead" argument got wrong

Looking back, the confident predictions made three mistakes.

First, they treated "print" as one thing. A newspaper, a phone directory and a novel share a technology but not a purpose. The question was never whether ink on paper could survive, but whether each use of ink on paper was better served by a screen.

Second, they assumed the new format would replace the old rather than sit beside it. In practice, formats in publishing tend to accumulate. Hardbacks did not disappear when paperbacks arrived, and print did not disappear when e-books and audiobooks arrived. Many books now exist in all three, and many readers move between them depending on the situation.

Third, they underestimated how much of the value of a book lies outside the text: the browsing, the shelf, the gift, the signed copy, the bookshop event. Those things turned out to be hard to digitise, and they helped physical bookshops survive the arrival of online retail better than many expected.

What the argument got right

It would be too easy to say the prophets of print's death were simply wrong. They were right about a great deal.

So, is print dead?

No, but it is no longer the only way a book exists, and in some kinds of publishing it is no longer the main one. The better question is which jobs print still does best. For reference and news, the screen won. For the long, immersive book read for pleasure or study, print held its ground, and the digital formats became additions rather than replacements. For the book as an object, print is arguably stronger than before, because it no longer has to compete on convenience and can focus on what makes it worth owning.

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