Across centuries and formats, after the invention of the printing press, paper books took the throne and haven’t gone away. From a technology-perspective. they not ‘kings of the jungle’ anymore. Let’s be realistic here, e-books solved so many obvious problems that printed books can’t.
There are obvious advantages that come to mind instantly. An e-book weighs nothing, there’s no waiting time associated with delivery, no warehouse needed, an e-book holds its place across devices, and different formats (epub, pdf, mobi, etc.) can adapt the text to a reader’s screen. There are several specific advantages as well.
- Reflowable format epub can easily migrate to fixed format, say, pdf in an online converter.
- Convertio can convert epub to pdf when a fixed-page version is more useful for printing, sharing selected pages, or working in software built around PDF.
Yet after more than two decades of mainstream digital publishing, printed books are still the dominant commercial format.
In the United States, 64% of adults said they had read a print book during the previous 12 months in a 2025 Pew Research Center survey. E-books reached 31%, while audiobooks reached 26%. Digital reading has unquestionably grown: in 2011, only 17% reported reading an e-book and 11% listening to an audiobook. But print use fell only from 72% to 64% over the same period. Digital formats expanded the ways people read without replacing the old one.
Also, let’s put the publishing industry’s finances under a magnifying glass, and look at some details, because they are not obvious. According to the Association of American Publishers, U.S. trade publishing generated about $21.7 billion in 2025. Hardbacks and paperbacks together accounted for 73.1% of trade publishers’ revenue: approximately $8 billion from hardbacks and $7.8 billion from paperbacks. This is hardly a niche for some weird nostalgic readers. It’s still the publishing business’ commercial goldmine.
A printed book is expensive to move around
IngramSpark, part of major book distributor Ingram Content Group, describes a 55% wholesale discount as a common industry-standard target when publishers want books stocked by independent bookstores. On a book with a $20 list price, for example, a 55% discount leaves a $9 wholesale price. The bookseller doesn’t put the whole difference in their pocket. The distribution chain is more complicated than that. But look how far the publisher’s receipts can be from the number printed on the cover.
But also, there’s another bump in the road. What are we doing with unsold books?
Bookstores can return them to the publishers, at least in the U.S. Ingram tells independent publishers that many bookstores expect books to be returnable because the policy reduces the retailer’s risk. For a publisher, however, the sale of a physical copy is not actually final when the book first leaves the warehouse.
As mentioned earlier, E-books remove lots of headaches from the whole flow of getting the written word out there for readers to enjoy. They don’t, however, make publishing free. A commercial e-book still has to pay its share
- acquiring manuscripts
- editing
- copyediting
- design
- digital production
- marketing
- administration
- author compensation
The Authors Guild’s model publishing contract, for example, describes 25% of publisher net receipts as the current standard royalty rate for e-books. The Guild has argued that authors should receive more precisely because electronic editions cost publishers less to produce and distribute than physical copies. And if money was the only factor here, digital should have been extremely difficult for print to withstand. That’s not the case.
Instead of replacing the book, technology created more versions of it
The single-product myth is gone. A new title hits the readers as:
- Hardback
- Paperback
- EPUB
- another e-book edition
- downloadable audiobook
- large-print edition
- special physical edition, etc.
Even EPUB itself has some identity issues. The W3C specification defines reflowable EPUB as the default, which means text can rearrange itself to fit the available screen, allowing the same publication to work across different viewport sizes. EPUB also supports fixed layouts when preserving the design is essential, such as in illustrated children’s books or comics.
PDF is different, and it’s essential for when fixed page geometry can make it or break it, or when visual placement or print output need to be stable. That is why format conversion can become part of an ordinary reading or classroom workflow rather than a technical project in itself.
Reading has become multi-format
If we get back to the Pew’s 2025 figures, we can notice that younger adults haven’t migrated away from paper. Among Americans aged 18-29, 66% had read a print book during the previous year, 41% had read an e-book and 32% had listened to an audiobook. Because respondents could use more than one format, those numbers describe overlapping habits. Not competing camps.
We see that in education all the time. A student may read a novel in print, carry reference material as EPUB on a tablet, convert it to PDF if required for printing or a particular workflow, and listen to another book while commuting. Are they reading for class? For pleasure? All those different motivators go into the numbers together.
No wonder that conversion tools remain relevant even in an ecosystem with dozens of reading apps. Publishers are not new to this, naturally, and sell the same work through several formats. Readers choose among them according to price, device, accessibility, convenience and purpose. Print has survived despite its manufacturing and distribution costs because digital technology did not make every function of a physical book obsolete.