Frank Schembari loves books - printed books. He loves how they smell. He loves scribbling in the margins, underlining interesting sentences, folding a page corner to mark his place.

 

Schembari is not a retiree who sips tea at Politics and Prose or some other bookstore. He is 20, a junior at American University, and paging through a thick history of Israel between classes, he is evidence of a peculiar irony of the Internet age: Digital natives prefer reading in print.

 

"I like the feeling of it," Schembari said, reading under natural light in a campus atrium, his smartphone next to him. "I like holding it. It's not going off. It's not making sounds."

 

Textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning,  

a bias that surprises reading experts given the same group's proclivity to consume most other content digitally. A University of Washington pilot study of digital textbooks found that a quarter of students still bought print versions of e-textbooks that they were given for free.

 

"These are people who aren't supposed to remember what it's like to even smell books," said Naomi S. Baron, an American University linguist who studies digital communication. "It's quite astounding."

 

Click here to read the full article.

 

--The Washington Post, February 22, 2015

 

Thanks to Nicole Magistro, The Bookworm of Edwards, for posting this article.