Are Books Still Winning Over Screens?

Walk into any school library today, and you will likely find two things coexisting rather uneasily: a librarian encouraging students to sign out a paperback, and a student who would have read three articles, a thread, and half a novel — all on their phone. The question of whether books are losing to screens turns out to be less of a contest and more of a quiet negotiation, one playing out in classrooms across India.

A generation that reads differently, not less

Today’s students aren’t necessarily reading less, they’re reading differently. A book might now compete with an e-book, an audiobook on the commute, or a 20-second video that sends a student hunting for the forgotten paperback it referenced. Reading has become less of a daily routine and more of a multi-format habit — scattered, socially discovered, and, teachers admit, a little harder to measure than it used to be.

That doesn’t mean the printed book has lost its pull. In school libraries, reading challenges — a familiar sight during Library Week or reading-month drives — students still show up in surprising numbers for the specific pleasure of physically finishing a book and moving it from one shelf to another. There’s a small but real satisfaction in a stamped library card that a reading app simply can’t replicate. 

To cope with the times and the reading ‘differently’ challenges some inventions have come to fore. Like reading challenges with visible progress trackers, buddy-reading programmes pairing older and younger students, and library periods that double as quiet, phone-free hours have become common tools. 

Some schools have gone further, turning reading into something closer to a social activity — book clubs, author interactions, and peer reviews. Teachers running these programmes report a consistent pattern wherein students rarely need convincing that reading matters. 

Interestingly, much of the current research on this subject lands on a more nuanced worry than books versus screens. The bigger concern for reading and learning is fragmented attention — short bursts of scrolling replacing the sustained, immersive stretches that deep reading requires — rather than digital reading being inherently worse than print. A student who reads consistently on a tablet may still be a reader in every meaningful sense; a student who owns dozens of unread paperbacks may not be.

For parents and teachers who grew up trading paperbacks in a school corridor, the nostalgia is real. But the more useful takeaway from today’s classrooms may be that the book isn’t losing to the screen so much as learning to share space with it. What matters most — for comprehension, imagination, and simply the quiet joy of finishing a good story — isn’t the format a student chooses, but whether reading, in any form, remains a habit they actually look forward to.