Generations of Readers

Simone Murray has asserted that historians of reading share five foundational assumptions: reading is active; format informs reading interpretation; reading is specific to the reader’s historical and geographical context; studying reading requires empirical methods; and reading is inherently social.Footnote ³ When studying Gen Z readers, it is likewise critical to acknowledge that Gen Z readers are active participants rather than passive recipients of media (including books). Format matters to them, but format usage is also quite fluid for this generation. These considerations help to explain why the social aspects of reading are a vital part of the reading experience for Gen Z readers. We approach this topic using empirical survey methods that contextualize the historical context of the lives and experiences of these digital natives, for whom there never was a lived experience before the internet. Our survey’s geographical context is the United States, but the analysis also has relevance and implications for thinking about Gen Z readers globally.

Studying generations of readers allows scholars to examine how pivotal cultural and historical moments shaped cohorts into both unified groups and atomistic reading communities. For example, World Wars I and II are pivotal generational experiences because they wrought disruptive change and initiated specific rite-of-passage experiences to different age groups, such as young male soldiers who shipped out to battle grounds, and young women back home who worked factory jobs to manufacture essential items for the war effort.

More specifically, WWI soldiers ages 18–25 (the “Lost Generation” born 1883–1900) experienced significant changes in their reading habits. A high proportion of the soldiers became avid readers in the trenches, where reading acquired heightened importance as soldiers’ primary leisure occupation in static frontlines. Soldiers developed preferences for portable, cheap editions and read for both escapism and emotional support.Footnote ⁴

WWII soldiers ages 18–28 (the “Greatest Generation” born 1901–1927) transformed from nonreaders to book consumers through the Armed Services Editions program, which created an entire reading generation.Footnote ⁵ The average WWII soldier had an 11th-grade education and did not read books for pleasure before military service,Footnote ⁶ primarily because hardcover books were so expensive. Yet soldiers became avid readers through the democratization of reading formats that the Armed Services Editions program provided. The postwar impact proved these wartime reading experiences to be transformative: 2 million veterans signed up for college education via the GI Bill, many becoming the first in their families to pursue higher education.Footnote ⁷ These veterans returned home with permanent reading habits, proving the viability of mass-market paperbacks and setting the stage for the postwar publishing boom.Footnote ⁸

During the Great Depression, reading and library use increased as people turned to fiction to escape from harsh realities.Footnote ⁹ These young adult readers, also part of the Greatest Generation, benefitted from the Works Progress Administration Library Extension program (1935–1943), which spurred an expansion of the US public library system, building approximately 200 new libraries, 3,400 new reading rooms, and 5,800 traveling libraries.

These examples demonstrate that reading habits function as indicators of generational experience, responding dynamically to wars, economic upheavals, labor conditions, social movements, and technological transformations. With this as our foundation, we embark on a journey to study Gen Z as readers, and, in doing so, to draw upon the wisdom of several academic fields that have used generational data to uncover patterns and insights.

Studying Generations

As previous reading research has shown, the combination of historical moment, geographic context, and format/medium can influence generations of readers. Generations have been an object of study beyond the history of reading, often in social science fields such as psychology, business, marketing, human resources management, sociology, and political science; these disciplines have used generations prominently as a concept, lens, and tool. From the field of psychology, Jean Twenge’s work has focused on generational behaviors and characteristics for Gen Z and other generations. Based on her research with generational datasets, Twenge notes that “the era when you were born has a substantial influence on your behaviors, attitudes, values, and personality traits. In fact, when you were born has a larger effect on your personality and attitudes than the family who raised you does.”Footnote ¹⁰ From political science, Friedman and Schultz note that “across a range of areas of everyday life, pop culture, and academic disciplines, generations as a tool of inquiry and object of curiosity has become more established.”Footnote ¹¹ However, the best example of the interdisciplinary endeavor of studying generations is the work of Katz et al. whose team of researchers comes from linguistics, anthropology, theology and cultural history, and sociology to come together to explore multiple facets of generational experience. Katz et al. see Gen Z as characterized by “distinctive ways of being, values, and worldview that are shared.”Footnote ¹² Thus, studying generations is an interdisciplinary endeavor that can illuminate the history of reading and beyond.

But what is a generation, and what is the best way to study one? Foundational scholars in this space, such as philosopher and historian Giuseppe Ferrari and sociologist Karl Mannheim, define generations by birth year, often a period of twenty to thirty years, because it aligns with the cycle from birth to adulthood.Footnote ¹³ Certainly, twentieth- and twenty-first-century generations have been demarcated by birth years, such as the generational categories Millennials (1981–1996) and Gen Z (1997–2012). But there are two other aspects of generational definition that are worth integrating: historical markers, such as the impact of World Wars I and II in our previous examples, and technology. These aspects often play a role in the start and end dates for generation definitions. For Gen Z, the dates place the cohort in middle school and high school during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2021), post-commercialization of the internet in the mid-1990s, and social media infiltration during their childhoods. Katz et al. see in Gen Z a generational experience that was never without the internet as a distinguishing feature, which is why these authors assert that “Gen Zers are shaped by and encounter the world in a radically different way from those who know what life was like without the internet; they seamlessly blend their offline and online worlds.”Footnote ¹⁴

It should be noted of Katz et al.’s book-length study that their interview data is drawn from college-enrolled Gen Z students (at Stanford University, Lancaster University, and Foothills Community College). While there’s a breadth of lived experience among students of these three institutions, the study doesn’t interview people who haven’t attended college. This limitation is analogous to Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of generation as a meaningful classification when compared to the salient features of class.Footnote ¹⁵ From Bourdieu’s perspective, two readers aged 25 and 65 who attended the same elite college are more likely to share reading tastes than two readers aged 25, one of whom attended an elite college and the other of whom did not attend college. Generational classifications indicate shared experience of historical and technological events, but they don’t capture the kinds of intersectional lived experiences that shape what Mannheim would call “generational units.” Our study explores a range of generational units within Gen Z, cutting across education and income levels.

Does generational classification need something beyond generational dates that correspond with historical events and technological changes? Political scientist Carpini (1989) asserts that while generations are age cohorts, they need to have “values, attitudes, opinions, and/or behaviors that have been shaped in relatively stable and unique ways by history.”Footnote ¹⁶ In other words, we might think of generational groups as “imagined communities”Footnote ¹⁷ with a particular group identity. This identity is “contingent on life cycle as well as the events that take place that shape shared beliefs and values.”Footnote ¹⁸ To this we add the work of intersectional feminism, which identifies overlapping domains of oppression: structural; disciplinary; cultural; and interpersonal. Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to conceptualize the impacts of these variables on lived experience.Footnote ¹⁹

Clearly, generational classification is not without its limitations. Strauss and Howe are prominent but also highly criticized scholars of generational cohorts.Footnote ²⁰ The Strauss and Howe model assumes that generations are inevitable, without taking into account the generational identity, consciousness, or community necessary for generations to be a meaningful variable and object of study. Critiques of generational analysis note that it conflates three distinct phenomena: historical period, human age in their life cycle, and generation. As Friedman and Schultz describe, “[p]eriod effects are the result of major events that all of society is exposed to; age effects are about attitude changes in the life cycle of human aging and development; and generational effects are the attitudes and cultures of particular age cohorts.”Footnote ²¹ In other words, scholars engaging with generations as a category must be cognizant that major events do not necessarily impact all people living during those events in the same way. While there might be common experiences, for generation to be a meaningful indicator, it must be clear how the cohort’s age during the event specifically changes their identity and perspectives as a group. A simple example of this is how certain historical events prompt people to ask: Where were you when? For example, where were you when COVID lockdowns happened? Or when the Berlin Wall fell? Humans cycle through shared experiences in the span of a lifetime; scholars must ensure that generational analysis is not just observations about a particular time of life, nor of one particular group standing in for the whole.

The study of generations is a useful starting point to interrogate the behaviors of a complex, heterogeneous group of people. This is true of studying a group by any variable: national identity, race, gender, income, and so forth. When it comes to generational cohorts of readers, we take to heart Driscoll’s caveat that “there is no uncomplicated picture of declining reading, ageing readers, or a narrow reading class; much depends on how data is collected, and which events or practices are considered. The varied answers to the question of who reads show just how important it is to understand reading as diverse, dynamic, and multidimensional.”Footnote ²² Any groupings, including generations of readers “can be overly blunt.” Much of the analysis depends on what questions the scholars ask and what data they collect to be analyzed.Footnote ²³

Methodology

To study Gen Z readers, we have used empirical methods that take self-reported answers and statements about reading seriously and at face value. In this, we follow Driscoll’s call to reading researchers that we “need a methodology that is attentive, open-minded, and inclusive: interested in readers’ own statements, and the discussions and practices that can build around them.”Footnote ²⁴ This is in line with feminist standpoint theoryFootnote ²⁵ and feminist praxisFootnote ²⁶ utilized by other reading researchers. Despite the limitations of self-reported data, we find that the value it provides for giving readers a voice makes it a worthwhile endeavor.

Our analysis in this Element is based on two survey datasets from 2022 and 2025. In 2022, we gathered 2075 survey responses from Gen Z (then aged 13–25) and Millennials (then aged 26–40), and in 2025, we gathered 2000 survey responses from Gen Z only (aged 13–27). We will be using the Gen Z responses from both 2022 and 2025 to inform the analysis, a total of 2919 responses. We used quota sampling, a non-probability sampling method, to gather online survey responses through a Qualtrics panel. Quotas were implemented to ensure US national representation, and these quotas were calibrated to US Census proportions for gender, race, and region.

The survey questions and method plan for the 2022 and 2025 surveys received approval through the PSU Ethics Board IRB. The survey questions changed very little between the two years; however, in the 2025 survey, we did include questions about media identity salience, loneliness, and AI use. These additions were based on limitations we noted in the 2022 survey responses and changes in US media use since we had collected data in 2022. Survey questions can be clustered into several general categories: demographic questions (race, gender, region, etc.); book discovery methods; media identities; public library use; reading behavior; social media use; generative AI use; visits to bookstores; and piracy. The questions were primarily multiple choice and check all that apply, so that the survey could be taken in 15 minutes or fewer.

What defines Gen Z’s media consumption landscape, and how does it shape their perceptions, motivations, communities, and identities? This was our overarching question that the survey questions plumbed. Our approach to book engagement and reading is intentionally broad to encompass a range of activities. While we asked respondents about traditional reading by format (print, ebook, and audiobook), we also asked about other types of reading, such as email, text messages, and livestream chats on YouTube, Twitch, and Discord.

This inclusive approach aims to shed stigma related to certain types of reading or other media engagement in an effort to capture behaviors that often are not “counted” as reading: not completing a book, for example, or sampling a book one consults as a reference (cookbooks, travel guides, books used for school or business). We also asked questions specifically about graphic novels, webcomics, fanfiction, and fan culture behaviors to understand the broad patterns of engagement across media.

Describing reading “from the ground up”Footnote ²⁷ is a practice championed by many other scholars of reading.Footnote ²⁸ This strategy starts with gathering data from readers (via the survey), describing the data, and then critiquing it.Footnote ²⁹ Quantitative analysis of the survey respondents has included descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations, chi-square tests, and correlations. SPSS and Excel have been used for this analysis.

Although the dataset comes from US Gen Zers, we believe the findings and implications are relevant to discussions of Gen Z reading and media consumption worldwide. Many of these findings build upon similar conclusions that Rehberg Sedo and Fuller draw in their focus groups with Gen Z people all over the world. Many of the environmental aspects that impact Gen Z – the internet, social media, piracy, AI, loneliness, and mental health struggles – are true of Gen Zers across national contexts. Therefore, although this data is nationally inflected, it is not nationally bound or limited. We hope that researchers of reading, publishing, and book history across the world will find interesting and relevant insights from this Element that apply into their own national contexts.

Generation Z

Gen Z have been called by other generational nicknames, but “Gen Z” has been the one with the most staying power. Other terms have included Zoomers, Homeland Generation or Homelanders,Footnote ³⁰ and iGeneration.Footnote ³¹ The most commonly used birth years for Gen Z are 1997–2012,Footnote ³² though, as noted earlier, generational dates are neither precise nor universally agreed upon.Footnote ³³ In our study, “Gen Z” were individuals aged 13–27 when we last collected data in August 2025.

Throughout this section, we will neither pathologize nor romanticize Gen Z. This generation has been variously labeled the Superhero generation,Footnote ³⁴ iGen,Footnote ³⁵ Generation Why,Footnote ³⁶ Generation Anxiety,Footnote ³⁷ and Generation Brave.Footnote ³⁸ Rather than adopting any of these characterizations, we focus on understanding the defining features of this cohort through empirical research and critical analysis.

Gen Z are differentiated from older generations by their lifelong immersion in digital technology. The internet has been a constant presence throughout their lives. Social media has been integral to their experience since early childhood. Consider the timeline of major social media platform launches: MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Reddit (2005), Twitter (2006), Instagram (2010), Pinterest (2010), Twitch (2011), Discord (2015), and TikTok (2016). With the release of the iPhone in 2007, the internet became an “always on” experience for Gen Z with access to a smartphone, be it their own or their parents’. The oldest Gen Z kids were ten years old when mobile computing became possible. By 2016, mobile became the dominant way people accessed the web.Footnote ³⁹ The handheld computer has given Gen Z constant access to a world of information and digital connections. The turn to online socializing through mobile devices was intensified when, in 2019, millions of Gen Z spent their formative teenage years navigating the global COVID pandemic that severely restricted in-person socialization.

Twenge has relied on large-scale quantitative data and analysis to examine Gen Z, but her methods and her findings have attracted some criticism. As Roberta Katz explains in a nuanced review of Twenge’s 2017 book,Footnote ⁴⁰ Twenge compares Gen Z’s survey responses with older generations’ responses to the same questions when they were the Gen Zers’ age, in some cases stretching back to 1972. Katz observes that Twenge “acknowledges that American demographics have changed over the decades [during which] these surveys have been in use but feels confident the results reflect generational, as opposed to changing demographic, trends.”Footnote ⁴¹ It’s hard to imagine that the same survey questions posed in the 1970s wouldn’t resonate differently today and thus skew the results. As one example, TV was the dominant form of mass media in the 1970s. In the United States (Twenge’s national focus), there were three major national networks, a handful of locally syndicated channels in each market, and no way for anyone to watch TV outside of the broadcast time: The VCR wasn’t widely available until the early 1980s. It’s hard to imagine that survey respondents immersed in this media environment would map accurately onto today’s Gen Zers. Another critique of Twenge’s methods is that it doesn’t sufficiently account for proportional increases in survey responses from Black, Latinx, Asian, Asian-American Pacific Islander, and mixed-race Gen Z people. These two features of Twenge’s methods illustrate why her conclusions about Gen Z people may not have a solid basis for comparison. Her claim that today’s younger generations are more selfish,Footnote ⁴² and that social media causes mental health problems in younger generationsFootnote ⁴³ should be read skeptically.

Stanford anthropologist Roberta Katz and her colleagues bring more nuance and better methods to their study of Gen Z, primarily through a qualitative lens and interdisciplinary, collaborative research perspectives from linguistics, sociology, history, and anthropology.Footnote ⁴⁴ Katz et al.’s method was to conduct interviews and focus groups with Gen Zers, studying them “in their own terms” and “in their own words.” The scale of this research was substantial: 120 interviews, focus groups, a corpus, and two follow-up surveys with Gen Zers in the United States and United Kingdom. Both TwengeFootnote ⁴⁵ and Katz et al.Footnote ⁴⁶ identified broad characteristics of Gen Z culture. We highlight and expand upon their observations to encompass two characteristics: Gen Z are diverse and inclusive, and online and digital.

Diverse and inclusive. Gen Z are the most diverse American generation to date across multiple dimensions of identity. They are the most racially diverse generationFootnote ⁴⁷ and demonstrate greater fluidity and diversity in gender and sexuality than previous generations.Footnote ⁴⁸ Compared to older cohorts, Gen Z individuals are more likely to identify as gender fluid, transgender, and queer.

This diversity extends to Gen Z’s political engagement. Their voter turnout in the 2020 US national election marked the “highest youth turnout for that age bracket recorded so far in the 21st century.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This heightened political consciousness likely stems from coming of age during a polarized political era characterized by Donald Trump’s 2016–2020 presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic. Friedman and Schultz dub Gen Z a “political generation,” noting that “a growing amount of evidence suggests that Gen Z is culturally and politically distinct in their issue concerns, level of activism, and party identification.”Footnote ⁵⁰ They argue that Gen Z’s emerging political consciousness has also been shaped by widespread protests responding to viral videos depicting abuses of state-sponsored power.

Gen Z have been called a values-based generation because they prioritize environmental and social issues, such as climate change and diversity and inclusion. Narayanan found that Gen Z were particularly concerned about sustainability compared to previous generations and demonstrated that they value and reward corporate social responsibility practices with actual purchase behavior rather than just stated preferences.Footnote ⁵¹ Mas-Manchon et al. also found that Gen Z placed a higher value on companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility commitments than other generations.Footnote ⁵² Likewise, Manley et al. found that Gen Z had higher perceived importance, value, and necessity of sustainable clothing and environmental concerns.Footnote ⁵³ However, Djaforova and Foots showed that while Gen Z has strong awareness and desire toward ethical issues driven by social media exposure, there is a significant attitude-behavior gap due to financial constraints and life stage.Footnote ⁵⁴

Online and digital. Gen Z’s relationship with digital technology is both ubiquitous and distinctive. As Twenge observes, smartphones differ fundamentally from previous media-displaying technologies because they infiltrate “nearly every minute of our lives, even when we are unconscious with sleep. While we are awake, the phone entertains, communicates, glamourizes.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Gen Z have lived most of their lives with social media and all of their lives with the internet. Gen Z recognize the paradox that digital technologies present. As Katz et al. note, “[t]he wonders of technological change are held as keys to a better future, but none has yet brought utopia, and many have made life more precarious, all overshadowed by the as yet mostly unknown consequences of the development of artificial intelligence.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Privacy and security are less assured, no longer a bedrock assumption of daily life. Gen Z are wary of the bargain that social media enforces: speed, convenience, and access to vast troves of information in exchange for privacy and the freedom to rest without wondering or worrying what’s happening when you’re not monitoring your social networks.

Digital immersion shapes how Gen Z engage with all media, including books. Fuller and Rehberg Sedo found that Gen Z readers situate books as media objects within a larger ecosystem of platforms, products, and technologies.Footnote ⁵⁷ Gen Z are crossmedia omnivores and use a variety of media and formats to suit their needs, although they still prefer print books. Gen Z exemplify the contemporary multimodal reader who reads multimodally in three dimensions: navigating post-digital culture (print and digital cultures together), accessing content transmedially, and reading across various devices. Thus Gen Z engage with both print and digital, across media and across devices.

Gen Z’s format preferences challenge assumptions about digital natives preferring screens. In our 2025 data, print remains Gen Z’s #1 preferred book format.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, Gen Z’s relationship with ebooks differs from older generations because Gen Z are primarily reading via smartphone rather than a dedicated ebook reader. In 2020, 77 percent of Gen Z read ebooks on their smartphones, compared to just 20 percent of the Silent Generation.Footnote ⁵⁹ Despite concerns that digital natives read less, research shows that Gen Z actively engage with books across multiple formats and value visual storytelling that connects to their broad multimodal literacy practices.Footnote ⁶⁰

Physical public libraries remain relevant to Gen Z despite, or perhaps because of, their digital immersion. About 54 percent of Gen Z visited a physical library within a twelve-month period,Footnote ⁶¹ and 62 percent have library cards.Footnote ⁶² Notably, 23 percent of Gen Z who do not identify as readers still visited a physical library,Footnote ⁶³ suggesting that libraries serve purposes beyond traditional book borrowing. They function as risk-free sampling spaces and safe, no-cost environments for socializing.

Gen Z’s fiction genre preferences differ markedly from those of older generations. They are most likely to read fantasy (53 percent), young adult fiction (49 percent), romance (49 percent), horror (36 percent), science fiction (32 percent), short stories (27 percent), and graphic novels (19 percent).Footnote ⁶⁴ These preferences align with their cross-media consumption patterns, as many of these genres have strong presences in gaming, streaming, and social media communities.

Our Argument

We have highlighted two characteristics of Gen Z: diverse/inclusive and online/digital. However, we would also like to deepen the specificity of these characteristics. Gen Z paradoxically navigate and bring together seemingly opposite, contradictory cultural beliefs and practices. Rather than seeing these contradictions as inconsistencies or generational confusion, we argue that these paradoxes constitute a distinctive feature of Gen Z identity. They reveal how this generation negotiates competing demands, desires, and realities in late capitalism and digital culture.

Like us, Katz et al. found that Gen Zers’ experience was “often paradoxical, even contradictory.”Footnote ⁶⁵ For example, while the internet gives them a voice, it also diminishes their agency. Katz et al. argue that Gen Z navigate paradoxes using three main strategies: clarifying self-identity, joining communities that align with their identities, and using collaboration to reject hierarchy.Footnote ⁶⁶

Gen Z are the values-based generation in an ethically ambiguous digital landscape. Yet they are also coming of age during the Generative AI boom, a technological revolution that brings enormous ethical concerns about authorship, labor displacement, algorithmic bias, environmental impact, and the very nature of creativity and human expression. Gen Z find themselves ethically torn by being early adopters of emergent AI tools while simultaneously expressing deep misgivings about AI’s origin in theft of copyrighted material, implications for their future careers, the integrity of their work, and the authenticity of online content.

This ethical complexity shapes their everyday digital practices. Always-online digital behavior has made some ethically ambiguous behaviors incredibly easy, such as media piracy. The motivations to pirate have also changed. Fragmented streaming services with constantly shifting IP rights, rising subscription costs, and geographic content restrictions can make it difficult for Gen Z to find paid ways to engage with the content they want. For many in this generation, piracy is not simply theft but a complex practice that intersects with convenience, accessibility, anti-corporate sentiment, and cultural preservation. Convenience, not cost savings, was the #1 reason Gen Z in our 2025 survey illegally downloaded copyrighted material. Some view piracy as a form of activism and a values-based practice that challenges monopolistic media corporations and champions universal access to culture. In his book Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy, Mueller asserts that media piracy is “a symptom of a much larger restructuring of cultural labor in the era of the Internet: labor that is digital, entrepreneurial, informal, and even illegal, and increasingly politicized.”Footnote ⁶⁷

This generation also grapples with the ethics of participating in platforms they ideologically oppose. Many Gen Z vocally critique TikTok’s data privacy practices, Instagram’s impact on mental health, and Twitter/X’s role in spreading misinformation, yet feel unable to leave these platforms without experiencing social and professional isolation. They are caught in what Taina Bucher calls “the tyranny of the algorithm,”Footnote ⁶⁸ where opting out means invisibility.

Gen Z may be the digitally innate generation – the generation who can’t remember a time before the internet and for whom the smartphone and social media have been constants in their lives and formative years – but they also love analog media: print books, vinyl records, physical CDs and cassette tapes, handwritten journals, and zines. BookTok has driven unprecedented sales of physical books among young readers.Footnote ⁶⁹ Independent record stores report that Gen Z comprises their fastest-growing customer demographic for vinyl. Polaroid and disposable cameras have experienced a resurgence in popularity,Footnote ⁷⁰ with young people deliberately choosing the constraints and unpredictability of film over the infinite editability of smartphone photography. Some Gen Z, frustrated by the constantly-shifting availability of their favorite shows on streaming media platforms, have started buying DVDs of that content.Footnote ⁷¹

Embrace of the analog is not nostalgia in the traditional sense because Gen Z are too young to have direct experience of vinyl, cassettes, or CDs as the only way to access recorded music on-demand. Instead, their engagement with physical media represents a deliberate counterbalance to or retreat from digital saturation. Perhaps because they are online so often, they intentionally engage with analog materials in interesting ways: curating physical book collections as aesthetic objects and expressions of identity; hosting listening parties where the ritual of playing a record becomes a shared social experience; or creating zines that circulate through trusted hands rather than algorithmic feeds.

O’Sullivan et al. suggest we now live in “post-digital” times, where the digital is so thoroughly integrated into everyday life that it becomes unremarkable.Footnote ⁷² For Gen Z, the choice to engage with analog media is not a rejection of the digital but a more complex negotiation of how to live meaningfully in a hybrid material-digital world. They livestream their vinyl listening sessions, photograph their bookshelves for Instagram, and create TikToks about their bullet journaling practice. The analog and digital are not opposite but entangled practices that together constitute Gen Z cultural curation and experience.

An apparent paradox, Gen Z struggle with mental health and loneliness at rates significantly higher than previous generations, even when social connection appears to be at their fingertips at all times. They have more tools for communication than any generation in history (instant messaging, video calls, social media platforms, multiplayer games, collaborative documents), yet they report feeling profoundly isolated and disconnected. Surveys consistently show Gen Z as the loneliest generation, with higher rates of anxiety and depression than millennials, Gen X, or Boomers at comparable ages.

This paradox reveals something fundamental about the nature of digital connection: proximity is not presence, visibility is not intimacy, and constant communication is not meaningful connection. Sherry Turkle’s research on digital communication describes us as “alone together,” physically co-present with our devices but emotionally absent from one another.Footnote ⁷³ The always-on nature of digital communication creates a constant, low-level awareness of others’ lives through their social media updates that can reduce the felt need for deeper, more effortful forms of connection.

This Element is organized specifically to explore these paradoxes, examining how Gen Z navigate contradictions that structure their lives. Each section takes one central paradox as its focus.

• • Section 1: The post-digital generation explores how Gen Z move fluidly between analog and digital, examining their embrace of physical media and what their hybrid practices reveal about authenticity, intentionality, and meaning-making in the digital age.

• • Section 2: Ethical conundrums for the values-based generation investigates the tensions between Gen Z’s strong ethical commitments and the morally ambiguous terrain of digital culture, including AI ethics, media piracy, platform participation, influencer culture, and the challenge of maintaining values within systems designed to extract attention and data.

• • Section 3: Loneliness and resilience examines the loneliness epidemic among Gen Z and how they are using multimodal reading as self-care, turning to libraries as third spaces, and cultivating media identities as forms of resilience against loneliness.

Theoretical Frameworks

Much like DriscollFootnote ⁷⁴ and Fuller and Rehberg Sedo,Footnote ⁷⁵ we approach the study of Gen Z’s reading behaviors and identities by conceptualizing reading as a dynamic social and cultural practice that fluidly incorporates in-person and online, print-based and digital. We intentionally define reading capaciously to include what Radway called “variable literacies”: the many ways and contexts in which people read.Footnote ⁷⁶ Radway said that reading “is a complicated semiotic and fundamentally social process that varies both in place and in time.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Post-digitalFootnote ⁷⁸ is an essential framework for our work in this Element because it acknowledges that digital and analog reading practices are now thoroughly intertwined rather than oppositional, reflecting the lived reality of readers who navigate seamlessly between formats, platforms, and modalities. The post-digital context and characteristics are what enable Fuller and Rehberg Sedo’s contemporary multimodal readers. The post-digital framework allows us to examine how Gen Z readers build social capital through their reading practices, forge parasocial relationships with authors and bookish influencers, and create meaning through the variable literacies that characterize their diverse engagements with texts across multiple contexts and platforms. Thus, the post-digital reading practices lead to post-digital consumption: consumers who engage with new and old media forms.Footnote ⁷⁹

We aim to approach the analysis of data from Gen Z and about Gen Z through a cultural lens. We see generations as cultural formations with distinct symbolic systems, values, and meaning-making practices shaped by media, technology, and cultural production. Several scholars argue that generational categories are social constructions shaped by discourse, marketing, media narratives, and cultural meaning-making rather than objective demographic realities.Footnote ⁸⁰ Race and gender, too, are socially constructed but can still be useful categories for analysis in understanding human experience. We acknowledge this critique and agree that generations are indeed constructed categories. Yet, like race and gender, generational identity remains a meaningful framework for analysis because it shapes lived experience, self-understanding, and collective practice. The cultural narratives and technological contexts that define Gen Z as a construct have real effects on how young people engage with reading, community, and identity formation. Our goal is not to reify generational boundaries but to examine how this particular cohort navigates reading practices within their specific historical and cultural moment, while remaining attentive to the diversity and contradictions within any generational category.

This Element argues that Gen Z are post-digital consumers who claim cultural capital through reading print books while fluidly engaging across digital formats as well. They have developed their own implicit ethical framework for media consumption that is a rational response to the structural contradictions of late capitalism’s information economy. They show remarkable resilience in the face of loneliness and the perils and promises of social media. Gen Z demonstrate themselves to be multimodal readers who engage in piracy for convenience and yet also seek deliberate slowness and friction via “third spaces,” such as at libraries.Footnote ⁸¹ The sections that follow examine how these practices both challenge existing paradigms and reveal emergent models of cultural consumption and social belonging.

Introduction

Despite the rise of digital book reading, including ebooks (following the launch of the Kindle e-reader in 2007) and double-digit growth in digital audiobook sales over the past decade,Footnote ⁸² print has almost always outsold digital. There have been notable exceptions, such as at the height of the ebook boom in 2011, when “e-book sales in adult fiction increased 117 percent to $1.27 billion, representing 30 percent of segment sales, and making e-books the largest single format within adult fiction, surpassing the hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback formats” (although not all of them combined).Footnote ⁸³ Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we might have expected digital formats to dominate given widespread lockdowns and physical bookstore closures, combined ebook and digital audiobook sales represented only approximately 20 percent of book sales.Footnote ⁸⁴ By 2024, combined print sales (paperback and hardcover) accounted for 79 percent of book sales in the United States, compared to only 21 percent for combined ebook and audiobook sales.Footnote ⁸⁵

These industry-wide statistics become even more intriguing when examined through a generational lens, particularly when we focus on Gen Z. Our research on Gen Z media engagement, including book buying, borrowing, and downloading across multiple years (2020, 2022, and 2025), reveals patterns that challenge conventional wisdom about digital natives and their media consumption preferences.

In 2022, Gen Z respondents reported buying an average of 28.8 print books per year and reading 25.2 print books per year, with 50.4 percent having read a printed book in the previous twelve months. These figures exceeded those of Millennials, who bought an average of 20.4 print books per year and read 20.4 print books per year in 2022, with 50.6 percent having read a printed book in the last year. By 2025, the gap had widened even more dramatically: Gen Z reported buying a median of 107 print books per year and reading 58 print books per year, with 65.2 percent having read a printed book in the previous twelve months. In 2020, Gen Z who had engaged with at least one book in the last year engaged with 204.36 books per year, compared to an average of 43.32 books per year for all generations older than Gen Z (who had also engaged with at least one book in the last year).

We include these numbers across the three years (2020, 2022, and 2025), but with the caveat that the ways in which the questions about book reading and book buying frequency were changed over the course of the three surveys. In 2020, the question was asked about “book engagement,” and the people surveyed were already readers in the sense that they had engaged with at least one book in the previous twelve months. This is why the numbers are so high in 2020. In 2022, we removed the screener question and got more specific and asked about the number of books read by format and books bought by format per month; the survey population was representative of the United States for the sampled age groups. In 2025, we changed the question to ask about the annual numbers of books read and bought by format. This change from monthly calculations to yearly calculations impacted how participants responded, leading to overestimation and variation in memory recall.

While the Gen Z book reading and buying frequency may not be comparable across the different years, their habits in comparison to other generations within that year’s survey are comparable. While only Gen Z were surveyed in 2025, the data from 2022 and 2020 shows that Gen Z engage with more books, read more books, and buy more books than older generations, especially when it comes to print.

There is no doubt that Gen Z are digital natives. It is clear that the internet and social media have hugely impacted and inflected their experiences for most of their lives, and they have grown up with streaming services, algorithmic recommendations, and constant connectivity. But Gen Z also love print books, challenging assumptions about linear technological progression and generational media preferences. This section argues that Gen Z’s affinity for print books is neither a contradiction nor anomaly but rather evidence that they are post-digital consumers, and that reading print books functions as a form of digital disconnection or analog oasis in their otherwise hyper-digtially connected lives.

Three research questions guide this section:

• • How do we reconcile Gen Z’s deep digital immersion with their material book preferences?

• • What does this paradox reveal about post-digital consumption patterns?

• • How do theoretical frameworks of remediation, digital disconnection, and post-digital theory help us to understand this phenomenon?

By examining Gen Z readers through these theoretical lenses, this section contributes to the understanding of both contemporary reading practices and of the broader dynamics of media consumption in an era characterized not by the triumph of the digital but by its coexistence with material forms, and a wider range of media materiality options allowing for more specifically intentional media choice making.

Post-Digital

To understand Gen Z’s relationship with print books, we must first establish “post-digital,” as coined and described by Cramer as “a contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets, or a period in which our fascination with these systems and gadgets has become historical.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This disenchantment with digital information and gadgets is not a rejection of them but rather a kind of normalization and, crucially, a recognition that digital technologies come with costs as well as benefits.

Central to the post-digital condition is the principle that, as Humayun and Belk argue, “connectivity is not, by default, superior to disconnectivity.”Footnote ⁸⁷ This represents a significant departure from the techno-utopianism that characterized early digital discourse, which assumed that more connection, more access, and more mediation were inherently valuable. The post-digital condition acknowledges that digital technologies create new problems even as they solve old ones, and that analog practices and objects retain and even accrue unique value rather than representing mere nostalgia or technophobia.

Humayun and Belk also argue that the post-digital “allows for an age of hybridity in which both the analogue and digital coexist.”Footnote ⁸⁸ This is not a zero-sum game where one format must triumph over another. Thus, the post-digital condition is characterized by consumers strategically navigating between a combination of different media forms, chosen according to context, purpose, and preference. As the owner of The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles observes, “some people prefer physical, tactile objects, and some people prefer clicking a button and having something instantaneously – there’s room for both, I think.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Humayun and Belk’s research on “postdigital consumption” provides a useful framework for understanding why, paradoxically, “even in a world that is saturated with the digital, we still seek out analogue objects.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Their work documents what they characterize as “a resurgence of analogue consumption” in which “consumers are seeking to escape the relentless march of the digital through the use of non-digital analogue objects.”Footnote ⁹¹ These objects include film cameras, vinyl records, paper notebooks, and, significantly, print books.

Humayun and Belk identify three primary motivations driving this post-digital turn toward analog objects. First, consumers use analog objects to escape surveilled consumption.Footnote ⁹² In digital environments, virtually all user behavior generates data that corporations collect, analyze, and monetize. Recommendation algorithms shape what we see, read, and purchase. Targeted advertising follows us across platforms. Analog objects, by contrast, “can provide avenues of escape from our digital world” and offer the possibility of “purely private experiences.”Footnote ⁹³ A print book read in a chair generates no data trail, triggers no algorithmic responses.

Second, analog objects allow consumers to “enchant their consumption with their labour.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Digital consumption is characterized by frictionless convenience: stream any song instantly, access any book with a click, and have purchases delivered to your door. This convenience comes at the cost of experiential richness. Analog consumption requires effort, such as visiting a record store, developing film, or organizing a physical library; this effort becomes meaningful, even pleasurable. Humayun and Belk put it this way: “The proliferation of the digital has led to a re-appreciation of postdigital consumption that involves craftsmanship and tangible connectedness.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus, it is because the digital exists that older forms, like print books, have become valued in particular ways.

Third, analog objects offer “continuity and permanence”Footnote ⁹⁶ in a digital landscape characterized by ephemerality. Digital content can be deleted, platforms can shut down, file formats can become obsolete, and licensing agreements can revoke access to purchased materials. By contrast, physical objects persist. A book purchased today can be read, reread, loaned, gifted, and passed down across generations. This permanence takes on heightened value in a cultural moment dominated by transient digital experiences.

Crucially, in post-digital consumption, the digital functions as “a background object foregrounding the analogue.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The ubiquity of digital technologies makes analog objects visible and valuable in new ways. Before digital photography, no one thought of cameras as “film cameras”; they were simply cameras. The advent of digital photography creates the category of “film camera” and invests it with meanings (authenticity, craft, aestheticism) that it did not previously possess. Similarly, the digital book makes visible the print book as a distinct object with its own affordances and appeals.

Gen Z: Multimedia, Multimodal, Multi-Device Readers

Fuller and Rehberg Sedo’s concept of the “multimedia, multimodal, multi-device reader” (MMR3) captures an essential quality of Gen Z book engagement.Footnote ⁹⁸ According to Fuller and Rehberg Sedo, MMR3 readers “use different devices, platforms, and formats according to their reading needs, but, given a choice, they will opt for a paperback or hardback book for pleasure reading.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The MMR3 framework emphasizes agency and strategic navigation: Gen Z readers are not locked into a single format or platform but move fluidly between them based on context, purpose, and preference.

Fuller and Rehberg Sedo observe that “post-digital book culture represents opportunities for choosing what to read, how or if they connect with other readers, and how they respond to books, other readers, authors, and publishers. The MMR3s act and interact within a mobile, networked, multimedia environment.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This passage highlights several dimensions of contemporary reading culture. First, choice and agency are central. Second, connection is optional rather than mandatory; readers decide whether to engage with reading communities. Third, readers navigate a complex ecosystem that includes but is not limited to books themselves – it encompasses authors’ social media presences, reader communities, crossmedia, and more.

Fuller and Rehberg Sedo provide an example to illustrate these features of Gen Z reading behavior and community: “Befitting the generation that coined the euphemism ‘Netflix and chill’, the streaming service and other subscription delivery systems peppered nearly every phase of the group discussions.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ One participant, Momo, described how a combination of news about a television adaptation and a friend’s recommendation led her to a particular novel. This anecdote illustrates how “books as media objects situated within a media ecology of platforms, products, and technologies” are “navigated according to tastes, economic resources, energy level, and mood.”Footnote ¹⁰²

This media ecology framework is essential for understanding Gen Z reading. Books do not exist in isolation but in a dynamic relationship with films, television series, social media platforms, streaming services, and recommendation algorithms. A Gen Z reader might discover a book through BookTok, check reviews on Goodreads, purchase a physical copy at an independent bookstore, photograph it for Instagram, read it in print form, listen to it in audiobook form, discuss it in an online community, watch the television adaptation on Netflix, and purchase special edition prints related to the adaptation. Each stage involves different platforms, formats, sensory inputs, and modes of engagement. The print book is one element within this complex assemblage.

Our survey data reveals distinctive patterns in how Gen Z discovers new books, particularly in their characteristic integration of analog and digital methods that exemplify post-digital consumption behaviors.

Print Books as Digital Disconnection Practice

The relationship between reading, disconnection, and social position deserves careful attention. The research of Karin Fast et al. presents evidence that disconnecting from social media is a gesture laden with class and economic signals. After a decade of digital connection boosterism, the toll of “always on” digital culture was beginning to be felt. “People are encouraged to (re)take control of their lives and create temporal and spatial zones void of (certain forms) of media [such as] mobile phone-free dinners, ‘digital detox’ vacationing, or screen-free bedrooms,” note Fast et al.Footnote ¹⁰³ In this context of growing skepticism about pervasive digital culture conveyed chiefly but not exclusively via smart phones, Jansson’s research found that people with more “cultural capital” – defined broadly by BourdieuFootnote ¹⁰⁴ as “taste and education” – had increased levels of “digital unease” compared to those with more economic capital. Janssen observes that “people who possessed cultural rather than economic capital tended to agree that they were stressed by their smartphone, that it disrupted their work, and that they used it too much.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This correlation between cultural capital and digital discomfort suggests that digital disconnection practices, including print book reading, have class dimensions.

Reading print books can be understood as part of a broader set of disconnection practices that signal cultural sophistication and allow for the cultivation of what is perceived as a more authentic, meaningful experience. It can also signal the financial privilege that disconnecting from digital notifications does not extract an economic consequence. “We found that people with cultural capital were more inclined to keep their mobiles muted and to disconnect from digital media while on vacation and when in nature,” Janssen notes. “They expressed a taste for establishing zones of disconnection in certain time-spaces of leisure.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In other words, those with cultural capital experience digital technologies as disruptive and seek to limit their presence in certain domains, particularly leisure time. They have both the awareness that constant connectivity is problematic and the resources (material and social) to enforce boundaries.

For Gen Z, who possess high levels of digital literacy but are also coming of age at a moment of widespread digital disillusionment, print reading may function as a way to claim cultural capital. While their parents’ generation might have demonstrated sophistication through early adoption of digital technologies, Gen Z can distinguish themselves through selective rejection or limitation of those technologies. Print reading becomes a mark of discernment, a refusal of the digital default.

The permanence and stability of print also contrast with digital ephemerality in ways that support sustained engagement. A print book cannot be updated, edited, or deleted. It does not surveil you. It requires neither charging nor software updates. Even books that are 500 years old still “open,” albeit gingerly. If preserved from damp and mold, they do not break or become incompatible with future devices. This medial stability creates psychological safety for deep engagement. One can commit fully to reading a print book with confidence that the text will remain available and unchanged unless the reader renders those changes themselves. This is a stark contrast with “controlled consumption” and surveillance endemic to most ebook reading platforms.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ When one reads a print book, no corporation tracks which pages one lingers on, which passages one highlights, how quickly one reads, or whether one finishes. Print reading generates no harvested data. This privacy, increasingly rare in digital environments, allows for unselfconscious, unmonitored engagement with texts. One is free to read slowly or quickly, to skip around, to abandon books partway through, without creating a record of these choices. The privacy of reading a printed book is a new valence of a very old reading experience.

Print books provide haptic and sensory experiences that ebooks cannot replicate. The balance of a book’s spine in the palm of one’s hand; the thickness of paper and detailing of the page edges, such as deckling; the smell of books both new and old; the visual pleasure of a well-designed cover and interior; and the satisfying heft of a thick volume – these sensory dimensions contribute to the “enchantment” of analog consumption,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ part of the embodied physicality of reading.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Indeed, the long history of the book as a media artifact documents significant transformations and adaptations to human tinkering and sensory desires, a process stretching back thousands of years, well before the codex made its debut.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The social affordances of print books differ from those of ebooks in important ways. Physical books take up space around us. They are visible on coffee tables, in the hands of commuters on public transit, shelved in libraries or classrooms. Such “human territoriality” communicates information about the reader’s tastes and interests.Footnote ¹¹¹ Books can become conversation starters, identity signals, and aesthetic objects. Bookstores, especially independent bookstores, are “third spaces”Footnote ¹¹² where readers browse together, recommend titles, converse with knowledgeable staff, support a neighborhood shop, and participate in a shared culture of reading.

The rise of Bookstagram and BookTok demonstrates how print books have been integrated into social media culture in ways that leverage their materiality. These platforms are intensely visual, and print books photograph well in ways that ebook readers do not. But it’s more complex than the visual staging – a carefully arranged stack of books with an aesthetically pleasing color palette, perhaps accompanied by coffee, plants, or cozy textiles – that has become a recognized genre of social media content. Rachel Wilson’s autoethnographic essay “Reading Like Rory: Post-Digital Reading on BookTok” details her experience tracking the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge (2014–present), in which BookTok enthusiasts emulate the reading practices of the daughter character in the popular television show Gilmore Girls (2000–2007). BookTok’s “platform-specific features influence the ways that communities of readers on social media engage with literature, even in the form of a physical book.”Footnote ¹¹³ Such reading “is caught up in cultural trends, both new and old, that cut across different forms of media … that respond to and rework older images of bookishness and understandings of literary value.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

BookTok was a significant print book sales accelerator in 2021 during the waning days of the COVID pandemic, when book sales shot up in the United States by 9 percent (and 2 percent in the UK). Kristen McLean, executive director and industry analyst at NPD Bookscan, attributes the rise in sales to BookTok, which moved books first in the young adult category but spilled into adult fiction and nonfiction.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This forms a stark contrast with the belief, circa 2012, that ebooks meant the “death of the book” after the 117 percent ebook sales growth in 2011,Footnote ¹¹⁶ an attention-grabbing statistic that reflected the growing influence of ebook sales on Amazon more than an enduring format preference among book buyers.Footnote ¹¹⁷ BookTok represents the digital foregrounding of the analog in a new way: digital connectivity enables and amplifies print book culture rather than replacing it. Digital and analog reading are not opposed but integrated in complex feedback loops.

Choosing print can signify values: support for independent bookstores, resistance to corporate control of reading, appreciation for craftsmanship and materiality,Footnote ¹¹⁸ commitment to disconnection, and focused attention. These associations make print reading appealing in ways that it might not have been had digital alternatives never emerged.

Rethinking Digital Native Narratives

One of the most significant findings of our 2025 data is the marked increase in Gen Z’s preference for print books since 2022. In 2025, 65.2 percent reported reading a print book in the last twelve months; in 2022, it was 50.5 percent. This section has aimed to contextualize why a nearly 15 percent increase in reading of print books has happened for Gen Z over the last three years.

The Gen Z reader challenges us to reconsider the validity of “digital native” as a predictor of media format preferences. Coined by Prensky in 2001,Footnote ¹¹⁹ the term “digital native” supposed that those who grew up with digital technologies naturalized into aspects of daily life would think and learn fundamentally differently from previous generations, for whom digital connectivity was not part of their childhood experience. “Digital natives” has led to an assumption that Gen Z would prefer digital interaction and reading formats.

While our survey data certainly demonstrates Gen Z’s pervasive use of digital media (reading of text messages, email, and social media posts hover around 85 percent), Gen Z’s print reading demonstrates that digital competence does not equate to a preference for reading in digital formats. Gen Z are more fluent with digital technologies than any previous generation.Footnote ¹²⁰ Typically, Gen Z are mobile-first when shopping, researching, or accessing health care services.Footnote ¹²¹ But generational categories like “digital native” homogenize diverse experiences and preferences. Not all Gen Z members can afford access to technology or reading in the same ways. Factors including class, geography, education, family culture, and individual temperament shape media use as much as generational membership. Treating Gen Z as a monolithic category risks missing important variations and overclaiming about generational effects.

The post-digital framework offers a more nuanced approach to understanding Gen Z reading preferences and behaviors. Rather than positioning generations along a linear path of increasing digitization, it recognizes that all contemporary consumers navigate hybrid media environments where analog and digital coexist. The specific ways individuals navigate these environments vary, but the condition of hybridity is general. Gen Z’s print reading is not an anomaly requiring special explanation but an instance of the normal pattern: people using multiple media forms strategically based on context and preference.

This section has argued that Gen Z’s seemingly paradoxical preference for print books becomes comprehensible through the lens of post-digital theory. Rather than representing a contradiction (digital natives who prefer analog media), Gen Z readers exemplify post-digital consumption patterns characterized by strategic navigation of hybrid media environments, valuation of material objects precisely because of digital saturation, and use of disconnection practices to manage digital entanglement.

Three key insights emerge from this analysis. First, the digital and analog are not opposed but mutually constitutive in the post-digital condition. Digital technologies make analog objects visible, meaningful, and valuable in new ways. For Gen Z, print books gain appeal precisely because they offer relief from the default condition of digital connectivity.

Second, materiality matters. Print books’ physical properties – their weight, permanence, sensory richness, visibility – support reading practices (sustained attention, deep engagement, private experience) that Gen Z values. These material affordances are not simply nostalgic preferences but functional advantages for certain kinds of reading in contemporary contexts. The material turn in digital studies helps us understand why even digital natives who could read everything on screens often choose not to.

Third, consumption practices reflect and construct identity, status, and values. Gen Z’s print reading is not purely instrumental but performative and meaningful. It signals cultural capital, demonstrates taste, creates community, and expresses values around attention, authenticity, and resistance to surveillance capitalism. Reading print books becomes a way of being a certain kind of person (thoughtful, cultured, selective about technology) in a world where such positioning has become both possible and desirable. For some, it is also a luxury.

These insights respond to our guiding research questions. We reconcile Gen Z’s digital immersion with their print preferences by recognizing that post-digital consumption involves strategic choices across media formats. The paradox dissolves once we abandon linear progression narratives. What this reveals about post-digital consumption patterns is that saturation creates demand for alternatives, that materiality provides value digital technologies cannot fully deliver, and that cultural capital increasingly attaches to practices of selective disconnection. Theoretical frameworks of remediation, digital disconnection, and post-digital theory illuminate these dynamics by positioning media forms in relationship rather than opposition, attending to material as well as informational dimensions of media, and recognizing human agency in navigating media environments.

Gen Z readers offer a revealing window into contemporary media culture. Their practices challenge technological determinism, demonstrate the enduring importance of materiality, and exemplify the complex negotiations required to maintain valued activities (sustained reading, deep attention, private experience) in thoroughly digitized environments. As the first generation never to know a pre-internet world, Gen Z might have been expected to embrace digital media unreservedly. Instead, their nuanced, strategic approach to media – embracing digital where it serves their purposes, choosing analog where it provides value – models a mature post-digital sensibility. The print book endures not through ignorance or nostalgia but through choice, valued precisely because alternatives exist. This is the post-digital condition: not the triumph of digital over analog but their coexistence in productive tension, navigated by consumers who recognize that different media serve different human needs.

Introduction

A 2022 report of findings from Roberta Katz and colleagues described Gen Z as self-driven, collaborative, diverse-minded, flexible, authentic, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, and adaptive.Footnote ¹²² This cohort has come of age in an era of technological advancement, social consciousness, and ethical awareness. Katz et al. note that technology has fundamentally shaped this generation’s communication and culture, including “the need to learn multiple social codes, collaborative modes of working together, and new behaviors and attitudes that have developed around the use of time.”Footnote ¹²³ They are lauded for their commitment to social justice, environmental sustainability, and ethical consumption. Yet, when it comes to their digital practices (particularly in relation to artificial intelligence use and media piracy), their behaviors often contradict their stated values. This section explores this apparent contradiction through the lens of political economy theory, seeking to understand how structural forces shape the ethical compromises that Gen Z navigates in their daily digital lives.

Two research questions guide this section:

• • How do we reconcile Gen Z’s strong ethical concerns and values-based ethos to their behaviors with GenAI and media piracy?

• • How can political economy help us to understand this contradiction?

By examining Gen Z readers through this theoretical lens, this section provides a deep dive into the ethical conundrums and contradictory behaviors and beliefs that the values-based generation (Gen Z) find themselves in when it comes to media.

The significance of this inquiry extends beyond academic curiosity. As Gen Z increasingly influence both the workforce and consumer markets, understanding their relationship with digital technologies and intellectual property becomes crucial for policymakers, educators, and industry leaders. Their practices may signal broader shifts in how society conceptualizes ownership, creativity, and ethical consumption in the digital age. This section argues that rather than viewing Gen Z’s seemingly contradictory behaviors as moral failings or generational hypocrisy, we must understand them as rational responses to the structural contradictions of late capitalism’s information economy.

The Political Economy and Digital Culture

The political economy approach to media studies provides a critical framework for understanding how economic structures and power relations shape cultural practices and consumption patterns. As Simone Murray explains in Introduction to Print Culture, “The political economy approach is the oldest of the theoretical movements that gave rise to the modern academic discipline of media studies. As such, political economy traces its intellectual lineage not from history, literary studies or bibliography (as with book history) but from the combination of left-wing social theory, economics and aesthetic philosophy undertaken by the so-called Frankfurt School.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Murray further notes that “the key insight of the Frankfurt School theorists was that economic structures in industrial societies have cultural effects.”Footnote ¹²⁵

This perspective moves beyond individual moral choices to examine the systemic forces that constrain and enable particular behaviors. Murray notes that the political economy “identifies problems caused by market structures that governments” must address.Footnote ¹²⁶ In the context of digital piracy and AI use, political economy theory reveals how the commodification of culture, the concentration of media ownership, and the contradictions of information capitalism create conditions where ethical compromises become normalized behaviors.

Digital technologies have fundamentally altered the materiality and perceived value of cultural goods. Unlike physical commodities, digital “content” can be reproduced at a massive scale and at near-zero marginal cost, creating what economists call “non-rival goods”: products or services that can be consumed by one person without reducing the amount available for others. This material reality isn’t inhibited by copyright law and economic systems designed to protect scarcity.

The political economy lens highlights how the concentration of media ownership and the platformization of cultural distribution have created new forms of gatekeeping, surveillance, and extraction. Streaming services, publishing conglomerates, and AI companies operate as intermediaries that capture value from both creators and consumers. In 2013, media and culture scholar Trebor Scholz identified “playbor” as the mechanism by which informational assets are voluntarily “shared” with platforms that host the content in exchange for ownership of the assets.Footnote ¹²⁷ The circulation of attention across these media objects (posts, likes, reshares, images, videos) is the basis of surveillance capitalism.Footnote ¹²⁸ This structural arrangement helps explain why Gen Z might simultaneously express concern for creators’ rights while engaging in practices that circumvent traditional payment systems.

Gen Z, having been born into and grown up entirely within this digital environment, fathom the contradictory social codes circulating around and through “always on” digital culture. Financial concepts like copyright, the creator economy, and “free” social media paid for by submitting to corporate tracking of one’s activity on the site are cultural elements that are naturalized for Gen Z as part of daily life. Coming of age alongside the phenomenon of “Influencers” who peddle intimacy via vlogging platforms like TikTok or Instagram Reels, Gen Z understands that they are the “targets” even as they also derive enjoyment from using social media. Whether or not Gen Z individuals followed Frances Haugen’s whistleblowing that revealed Meta ignored its own internal research that correlated increases in anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation among teens and use of Meta’s products, the Meta research itself quotes teenagers who made this connection. “82% of teens have felt one emotional issue in the last month,” Meta’s internal report notes. “One in five has thought about suicide or self-harm.”Footnote ¹²⁹ These data are an important context that conveys the economic incentives motivating social media companies to compel use from vulnerable populations, which minors are considered to be. This book presents our data about Gen Z’s social media use and its implications in Section 3.

The political economy framework for understanding Gen Z’s use of social media is not whether social media is inherently good or bad for well-being, but social media’s incursions on emotional well-being are viewed by Meta and other companies as acceptable collateral damage in a headlong pursuit of profit. Haugen testified before the US Congress that Facebook “consistently chose to maximize its growth rather than implement safeguards on its platforms, just as it hid from the public and government officials internal research that illuminated the harms of Facebook products.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Just as social media’s potential harms to minors are an open secret, so too is Gen Z’s engagement in illegal downloading of copyrighted material. Both are transactions tacitly recalibrating the value of “ownership” in digital media. They are setting new, emergent cultural norms.

Reconceptualizing Digital Piracy: From Crime to Quotidian

The scholarly literature on digital piracy has undergone significant evolution over the past two decades, moving from simplistic portrayals of the hacker in criminal/hero binaries toward more nuanced understandings of piracy as a complex, and quotidian, social practice. James Meese’s exploration of three “pirate imaginaries” provides a useful framework for understanding these competing narratives.Footnote ¹³¹ The first positions pirates as criminals who violate intellectual property laws and harm creative industries by reducing creators’ financial incentives for innovation. The second casts pirates as revolutionaries challenging the economic and power imbalances between artists and media corporations. The third, and the one most compelling for understanding Gen Z, presents piracy as a neutral, banal media practice.

This notion of the “neutral pirate” or “ordinary pirate” reframes our understanding of digital piracy from theft to a condition of engagement with digital culture. As Meese argues, “Instead of being viewed as outlaw consumers or revolutionary protestors, the pirate can instead be viewed as a mainstream digital citizen, more interested in questions of infrastructure and access than opposition and exclusion.”Footnote ¹³² This perspective aligns closely with Lawrence Liang’s (2011) conceptualization of piracy as a form of cultural “infrastructure” that is not a deviation from normal media consumption but rather an integral part of how digital culture functions.Footnote ¹³³

Constitutional law professor Lawrence Lessig distinguished between piracy of physical media, which he viewed as an unmitigated harm, and peer-to-peer file sharing. “The recording industry estimates that it loses about $4.6 billion every year to physical piracy … one in three CDs sold worldwide.” Lessig’s defense of “file sharing,” by contrast, situated the exchange of entertainment media in digital formats without compensation for artists and producers as an acceptable part of building a cultural commons. “Zero tolerance [of uncompensated consumption] has not been our history. It has not produced the content industry that we know today. The history of American law has been a process of balance. As new technologies changed the way content was distributed, the law adjusted, after some time, to the new technology.”Footnote ¹³⁴ In the twenty years since Lessig’s defense of file sharing, increases in internet speed and storage capacity have made the downloading of copyright files nearly instantaneous. Correspondingly, rights owners have found it difficult to completely protect the copyright of digital files.

The most spectacular examples of piracy may well be those perpetrated by AI companies building frontier models. These companies scraped the entire web, as noted in the California Law Review.Footnote ¹³⁵ Lawsuits target piracy of the Books3 dataset and “shadow” libraries such as Z-library and Library Genesis. Meta, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Databricks, and Nvidia have all been named in lawsuits.Footnote ¹³⁶ At the time of writing this book, these legal cases are working through the court system; some decisions are being handed down in US courts. Anthropic avoided court by paying in September 2025 a $1.5 billion settlement to authors of copyrighted books.

In his book The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property, law professor Jonathan M. Barnett argues that a massive, involuntary transfer of wealth has taken place since the late 1990s, where digital firms appropriate others’ content, technology, and informational assets – often paying nothing. Barnett claims, “Academics and activists mostly laud this involuntary transfer, and judges (including many of those who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court) and regulators widely exonerate, bless, or facilitate it.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Gen Z understands this contradiction even if they cannot always articulate it in economic terms. It’s an important context for understanding their attitudes and behaviors toward downloading copyrighted material and the use of Generative AI.

In the context of AI companies’ massive-scale theft, it’s hard to gauge the moral effect of individual people downloading media they haven’t paid for, especially when, as our data show, “pirates” are often superconsumers and fans (see discussion in the following). On the individual scale, piracy is more akin to discovery or sampling than theft. “If the record companies sold more records through sampling than they lost through substitution,” Lessig notes, “then sharing networks would actually benefit music companies on balance.”Footnote ¹³⁸ In our own 2020 study, Immersive Media and Books, roughly 30 percent of public library patrons went on to purchase books and other media they’d borrowed from the library. From this vantage, libraries can be considered showrooms for book publishers’ products. Many self-publishing authors give away the first books in a series, or large chunks of a new work, to entice reader interest and engagement. In doing so, they’re following Cory Doctorow’s maxim that “It’s very hard to monetise fame, but it’s impossible to monetise obscurity.”Footnote ¹³⁹

We should note here a distinction between individual end users discussed earlier and release groups that are suppliers and manufacturers of pirated content. The individual end user who downloads a copyrighted file without permission or payment is often using the file for their own personal use. Release groups facilitate the infringing behavior of others, usually on a massive scale. There emerges a chicken-and-egg question: would there be so much casual piracy if there weren’t large piracy syndicates willing to meet demand? Would release groups exist if it weren’t profitable – in money or burnished reputation, depending on the group – to give away billions of dollars’ worth of creative content? Stephen Witt’s brilliant reporting and forensic file sleuthing in How Music Got Free explains the complex tangle of human actors and technical systems built music piracy. It’s a window into the human motivations in pirating and copyright enforcement from the late 1990s to early 2000s.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The normalization of piracy reflects broader trends in information society. As da Rimii and Marshall observe, “The borders between piracy and everyday life in the information society are thin.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Their research reveals that digital piracy has become so embedded in daily practice that it has lost its “novelty value” and become “simply what people do to keep in touch, keep current with cultural conversations and consume impulsively.”Footnote ¹⁴² This mundane quality of piracy is particularly relevant for Gen Z, who have never known a world without easy access to digital copying and sharing technologies.

Importantly, this normalization is not merely a result of technological affordances but is actively encouraged by the logic of contemporary capitalism, where, da Rimii highlights, “the good consumer is impulsive, impatient and always aiming to own or experience now.”Footnote ¹⁴³ The qualities that make someone a good consumer in the attention economy – immediacy, omnivorous consumption, cultural fluency – also make them likely to engage in piracy when legal channels are slow, expensive, restrictive, or illogical. Bestselling fantasy and sci-fi author Brandon Sanderson broke with Macmillan/Tor over its refusal to grant ebook access for customers who’d purchased a print or audiobook version of a Sanderson novel. Sanderson is best known for having run the most successful Kickstarter in the history of the platform, earning $41,754,153 during a one-month campaign in March 2022, selling subscriptions to “Four Secret Novels” via his own publishing house, Dragonsteel.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

“I spent long phone calls with John Sargent, then CEO of Macmillan, arguing with him about what I considered his backward view of ebooks,” Sanderson reported on a FAQ he wrote during the Kickstarter campaign in 2022. “[Sargent] felt that bundling an ebook with a print book would devalue the ebook. I argued that it’s the text, not the format, that people are paying for. An ebook is worthless – it’s the text that is worth something.” Sanderson makes a moral appeal: If a customer has bought one of the two expensive-to-make formats (print, audiobook), then they should be entitled to a free ebook version as a gift of convenience to enjoy the ebook’s portability, search, built-in dictionary, and so on. Implicitly, Sanderson viewed Sargent’s refusal as exploitative. Such a view echoes the perspective of Henry Jenkins, fan culture and media scholar, who argues that “piracy” is morally nuanced.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Observing the behavior of fan communities that build “participatory cultures” around favorite storyworlds and media, Jenkins believes fans pirate when rights holders aren’t able to meet the demands of a sudden or unexpected market, as when Japanese animé rights holders permitted fans to create English-language subtitles, a relaxed attitude that expanded animé’s reach into United States and anglophone markets.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Does piracy harm rights holders? The evidence doesn’t present a definitive view, and academic interpretations differ. While Ma et al. found that prerelease movie piracy negatively affected revenue,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ post-release piracy showed no significant harm. A comprehensive meta-analysis of the literature found “the evidence insufficient to conclude with certainty that piracy harms legal sales,” particularly for games and books. What about the potential discovery benefits that file sharing can inspire? In an environment of abundant media, where people have instant access to hundreds of millions of songs, books, movies, shows, and games, illegal downloading might productively be framed as a risk-free sample that might lead to purchase – a kind of market expansion experienced by the rights owners of Japanese animé when they didn’t quash fan subbing.

These ambiguities around piracy are crucial for understanding Gen Z’s ethical calculations. If the harm of piracy is unclear or minimal, the moral imperative to avoid it weakens. If the potential benefit is the discovery of new entertainment, and the default understanding of capitalism’s prime directive is to extract maximal value from every customer, as in the Macmillan/Sargent example, then the moral compass charting piracy has no True North.

Gen Z Piracy Behaviors

If we understand piracy as a feature of the infrastructure of the digital media economy, rather than a moral failing or heroic activism, then it becomes clear how the practical and cultural contexts of digital media shape Gen Z piracy behaviors. Survey data from 2022 and 2025 reveal striking consistency in piracy practices, with approximately 60 percent of Gen Z acknowledging they download books for free (60.4 percent in 2025 and 61.3 percent in 2022). Even more tellingly, the primary reason given for this behavior is not economic but practical: 40.8 percent cite ease of access as their main motivation, with expense coming second. This prioritization of convenience over cost challenges assumptions about piracy being primarily driven by financial constraints.

The data on textbook piracy reveals similar patterns but with important distinctions. While slightly lower than general book piracy, the rates remain substantial, with 41.2 percent of Gen Z in 2025 and 46.4 percent in 2022 reporting they read or download textbooks for free. Again, ease tops the list of motivations, though the secondary reason – that textbooks are overpriced – carries particular weight given the educational context. This suggests a moral distinction in Gen Z’s piracy practices: While general book piracy is primarily about convenience, textbook piracy involves an additional layer of perceived injustice regarding pricing.

These data illuminate how piracy has become a normalized practice among this cohort, reflecting what da Rimini and Marshall describe as the thin borders “between piracy and everyday life in the information society.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The fact that “it’s easy” emerges as the primary driver for both general books and textbooks indicates that piracy has become so integrated into digital workflows that it represents the path of least resistance rather than a deliberate act of rebellion or theft.

The textbook piracy data deserves particular attention from a political economy perspective. The perception that textbooks are overpriced is not merely subjective; academic publishing operates as an oligopoly with profit margins that far exceed those of trade publishing.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Students, already burdened with unprecedented debt, are compelled to purchase materials essential for their education at prices that bear little relationship to production costs. In this context, piracy becomes a rational response to what many perceive as exploitative pricing.

Research by Kukla-Gryz, Tyrowicz, and Krawczyk demonstrates that consumers’ willingness to pay for digital content is significantly influenced by their perceptions of fair pricing.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The high rates of textbook piracy, combined with explicit identification of overpricing as a motivating factor, suggest that Gen Z has made a collective judgment about the fairness of academic publishing’s business model. Their piracy can be read as a form of consumer resistance against perceived price gouging in educational materials.

As Meese notes, pirates can be viewed as “mainstream digital citizens, more interested in questions of infrastructure and access than opposition and exclusion.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ This infrastructural perspective resonates with Liang’s analysis that positions piracy not as a criminal activity but as a form of cultural infrastructure necessary for participation in digital culture.Footnote ¹⁵²

However, in addition to noting that piracy is ordinary and frequent in the twenty-first century, we must address that Gen Z who pirate media might also be described as fans and superconsumers, buying and reading books at higher rates than Gen Z overall. According to the 2025 survey data, 54.9 percent of Gen Z who pirate media also buy the media. Similarly, 49.9 percent of Gen Z who pirate media also buy merchandise from those media that they’ve downloaded for free.

When we examined just the Gen Z respondents who said that they had pirated media, we found, indeed, that they were superconsumers and fans. Pirates bought a higher mean and median of print books, ebooks, audiobooks, and chapters and shorts annually. They are buying more books than other Gen Zers. Gen Zers who pirate are more likely to have visited their public local library in the past twelve months (77.2 percent compared to 66.9 percent), borrowed an ebook, audiobook, or other digital media from the library (64.1 percent compared to 35.9 percent), and bought a book in a bookstore in the last twelve months (73.2 percent compared to 67.9 percent). Gen Zers who pirate are also more likely to buy the same book in more than one format (46.3 percent compared to 31.5 percent), download the same book in more than one format (55.8 percent compared to 35.5 percent), read fanfiction (63.4 percent compared to 48.9 percent), write fanfiction (24.7 percent compared to 14.6 percent), and buy merchandize from their favorite fandoms (68.8 percent compared to 52.7 percent).

The collaborative and modular nature of Gen Z’s approach to problem-solving, as identified by Katz et al., extends to their piracy practices. File-sharing networks, BitTorrent communities, and streaming aggregators represent collaborative infrastructures that align with their broader values of cooperation and resource sharing. As the authors note, “The desire for collaborative ways of working and problem solving is widespread among postmillennials … [they] learned that collaborations could lead to exciting results.”Footnote ¹⁵³ In this context, piracy becomes not just an individual act but a participatory practice embedded in community networks.

The participatory culture aspect of piracy is particularly significant for understanding Gen Z’s engagement. Many piracy communities operate on principles of reciprocity and contribution, where users are expected to share as well as consume. This creates a gift economy that parallels other forms of online collaboration that Gen Z values, from open-source software development to fan fiction communities. The emphasis on “flexibility, modularity, and collaboration” that enables Gen Z activismFootnote ¹⁵⁴ also characterizes their approach to content sharing and distribution.

Gen Z AI Use

Approximately 47.6 percent of Gen Z respondents use AI for work or school purposes, indicating that these tools have already become integral to their productive lives. This adoption rate, while substantial, also means that roughly half of Gen Z is either choosing not to use AI, lacks access to these tools, or are underestimating their AI use because of perceived stigma for using AI tools. The reasons for use and nonuse provide important insights into their ethical calculations.

Among those who use AI, the primary motivation is efficiency, specifically, to free up time for more meaningful activities. The top three activities that respondents pursue with their saved time are telling: doing favorite activities, watching and gaming, and reading, and hanging out with family or friends. This suggests that Gen Z views AI not as a replacement for human creativity or connection but as a tool to reduce drudgery and create space for what they value most: leisure, entertainment, and relationships.

The specific applications of AI reveal a pragmatic approach to these technologies. For writing tasks, 35 percent use AI, but primarily for brainstorming ideas, editing drafts, and outlining plans – supportive rather than substitutive uses. The top reasons for not using AI to write are particularly revealing: “I like doing it myself,” “it’s unethical,” and “it won’t sound like me.” These responses suggest that Gen Z maintains a strong sense of authorial identity and creative ownership, even as they embrace AI for auxiliary tasks.

Visual art shows a similar pattern, with only 23.8 percent using AI for artistic creation, again primarily for brainstorming, time-saving, and planning rather than final production. The resistance to AI art stems from similar concerns: personal enjoyment of the creative process, ethical reservations, and concerns about authentic style. Music and video creation shows even lower adoption at 17.5 percent, though those who do use it cite time-saving as the overwhelming primary benefit (92.8 percent).

These patterns suggest that Gen Z has developed sophisticated strategies for integrating AI into their creative and productive practices while maintaining boundaries around core creative activities. They use AI instrumentally rather than expressively, as a tool for efficiency rather than a replacement for human creativity. This selective adoption reflects an implicit ethical framework that values human agency and authentic self-expression while acknowledging the practical benefits of automation for routine tasks. This nuanced approach aligns with what Katz et al. describe as their broader relationship with technology: “Gen Zers express critical awareness about the technology that shapes their lives in several ways, but especially in their sense of its potential to cause social damage – the harmful parts of the internet, the bias baked into algorithms – and in their sense that face-to-face time with people gives them something that online connection does not.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ This critical awareness extends to their use of AI, where they simultaneously embrace its practical benefits while maintaining skepticism about its potential to replace authentic human expression.

Conclusion

This section has examined what initially appears to be a paradox: A generation lauded for their ethical awareness and values-based decision-making also engages in behaviors of digital piracy and AI use that seem to contradict those very values. However, when viewed through the lens of political economy theory, this apparent contradiction becomes a rational response to the structural contradictions embedded in late capitalism’s information economy.

The political economy framework illuminates how Gen Z’s behaviors are shaped by forces far larger than individual moral choice. They navigate a digital landscape where content is infinitely reproducible yet artificially scarce, where creators are squeezed by platform intermediaries, where educational materials are priced as luxury goods, and where AI technologies promise efficiency while threatening authenticity. In this context, their selective piracy and instrumental AI use represent sophisticated strategies for accessing culture, completing necessary work, and maintaining creative autonomy within systems that often feel exploitative or restrictive.

Returning to the research questions that guided this inquiry: How do we reconcile Gen Z’s strong ethical concerns with their behaviors regarding GenAI and media piracy? The answer lies in understanding that Gen Z has developed an implicit ethical framework that distinguishes between supporting creators and resisting extractive systems. Their piracy data reveals them not as freeloaders but as superconsumers – individuals who both pirate and purchase, who engage with library systems, who buy merchandise, and who participate actively in fan communities. Their AI use similarly demonstrates boundaries: They embrace efficiency tools while resisting the replacement of authentic human expression.

How can political economy help us understand this contradiction? By revealing it as no contradiction at all. Political economy theory shows us that when information goods can be reproduced at near-zero marginal cost but are priced according to artificial scarcity models, when educational materials essential for success carry monopolistic price tags, and when legal access channels prioritize corporate profit over cultural participation, piracy becomes infrastructure rather than crime. It transforms from moral failing to practical necessity, from deviant behavior to normalized practice.

Gen Z’s approach to these technologies reflects what Katz and colleagues identified as their adaptive and pragmatic nature. They have learned to code-switch between different ethical registers: supporting individual creators while circumventing corporate gatekeepers, using AI for drudgery while preserving human creativity for meaningful work, and engaging in collaborative sharing networks that mirror their broader values of cooperation and resource pooling. These practices are not contradictions but rather coherent responses to contradictory structural conditions.

The normalization of piracy and the selective adoption of AI among Gen Z should be read as diagnostic rather than prescriptive: symptoms of deeper dysfunctions in how we organize cultural production and distribution in the digital age. Their willingness to engage in what previous generations might view as ethically problematic behaviors stems not from diminished moral capacity but from a clear-eyed assessment of the structures they inhabit. They understand, perhaps more intuitively than they can articulate, that the rules governing digital culture were written for a world of scarcity that no longer exists.

The values-based generation, then, faces not ethical conundrums of their own making but inherited contradictions in a system struggling to adapt to digital transformation. Their behaviors are less a departure from their values than an expression of them, enacted within constrained circumstances not of their choosing.

Introduction

Our 2025 survey reveals various data that convey the emotional resilience of Gen Z. The uptick in Gen Z visiting public libraries, reading print books, and valuing librarian book recommendations more than they did in 2022 suggests a shift in Gen Z’s approach to book discovery and consumption. In 2022, “social media, on my phone” was the dominant way Gen Z found books. During the three-year interval between our rounds of data collection (2022–2025), Gen Z’s wariness of social media seems to have increased, even though the vast majority of them still use social media daily and avidly. Social media, at this point in our culture, functions more like a public utility, an essential service, than an optional social context. One study measured the effects of outright abstinence from social media (as opposed to a short break or “digital detox”) on affect, subjective well-being, stress, and loneliness. The researchers found that those who abstained from social media experienced a decline in life satisfaction and increases in negative affect and loneliness compared to the control group.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

In 2024, the American cultural narrative about Gen Z’s social media use cast it in terms of urgent danger, as evidenced in the title of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ While exact sales figures cannot be known, it is estimated to have sold 1.7 million copies as of the time of writing. It hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list eleven times and stayed on the list for seventy-three weeks as of August 2025.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Even though the science in Haidt’s book is dubious – a study by Orben and Weinstein found the association “between digital technology use and adolescent well-being” to be negative but small, “at most 0.4% of the variation in well-being” (quoted in Katz et al. 163) – the cultural force of Haidt’s portrayal was pervasive. Media coverage was extensive, and it capitalized on conversations about the need to regulate social media. Several US states have created legislation to require parental consent and age verification (Utah, California, Virginia, and Texas), ban addictive features (California), and protect data privacy (California, Virginia, and Texas). Proposed federal legislation, the Kids Online Safety Act [KOSA], was founded in 2022 by a group of mothers whose children committed suicide after being victimized by cyberbullying or misinformation. KOSA was galvanized by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s release of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documentation in 2021 that revealed the social media company knew its products harmed kids but did nothing about it. KOSA failed to be approved during the US House of Representatives’ legislative session ending in December 2024, but is being reintroduced as of November 2025.

These cultural and political phenomena may have motivated Gen Z to trust the materiality of printed books, seek out the “third space” qualities of public libraries and devalue the recommendations of social media influencers and other talent accessed by social media. Third spaces anchor community life because they “encourage conversation in a homely atmosphere [where] people are free to come and go without obligation. The status and backgrounds of users are largely irrelevant. These places are generally designed to be accessible, accommodating and inviting for all ages, low-profile, comfortable and conversational,” observe sociologists Matthews and Dolley.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Three research questions guide this section:

1. 1. Why are loneliness and resilience apt frameworks for understanding Gen Z book behaviors and identities?

2. 2. Reports of leisure reading show steady declines from 2003 to 2023, but our data show that more Gen Z are identifying as readers in 2025 than in 2022. How to explain this paradox?

3. 3. Library visits and valuing of librarian recommendations have significantly increased among Gen Z since 2022. What might be some reasons for this?

Loneliness and Connection: Quality, not Quantity

Social isolation is a health risk with mortality impacts equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ This is one of several startling findings in Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, an evidence-based report authored by the United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the federal government’s highest ranking medical officer. Loneliness, the subjective feeling of being isolated, increases risk of death by 26 percent; social isolation, the objective experience of being alone, increases risk of death by 29 percent.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Gen Z people are almost twice as likely to report feeling lonely as those over age 65. The percentage of teens aged 13 to 17 years who report being online “almost constantly” has doubled since 2015.Footnote ¹⁶²

This general social trend is sobering but not totalizing. The Surgeon General’s report shares the good news that unlike some public health threats that require the expertise and intervention of medical professionals and therapies, loneliness and isolation can be mitigated by individuals modifying their own behavior, giving or receiving small acts of kindness from others; both mitigate loneliness. The report notes that the quality of social connection, not quantity, is a key factor in loneliness mitigation. About 90 percent of people who didn’t report loneliness had three or more confidants.Footnote ¹⁶³ For Gen Z, the quality of social connection happens in both embodied and online spaces, in both intimate friendships (the “confidants” of Murthy’s report) and in large communal spaces. Katz et al. observe that memes “provide a self-deprecating way to show fears, stresses, and vulnerabilities to others who might understand and provide comfort.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ “People take their depression or mental health issues and turn [them] into weird memes,” said Andy, one of their Gen Z interviewees. “All the horrible things – not only are we already looking at [them], we’re making jokes so it’s less scary.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Black and African-American Gen Z in our 2025 survey are lonelier than the general population: Loneliness score: 3.37 (compared to 2.38 mean), 3.33 (compared to 2.25 median). However, 69.1 percent of Black and African-American Gen Z had visited a library in the previous twelve months, 2.2 percent more than the general population (66.9 percent). They were more likely to discover books through libraries, which was their #1 discovery method. Librarian recommendations were almost as popular a way to discover books (14.2 percent) as through friends (14.7 percent ). Library use higher than the general population suggests Black/African-American resilience in seeking out human connection in the context of reading and books.

More Gen Z Identify as Readers in 2025 than 2022

Our 2025 data reveal a 15 percent jump in the number of people who identify as a reader: two-thirds of the population (65.9 percent) compared to 51.9 percent in 2022. In 2025, there was a slight downturn in what we might call “functional” reading: texting (86.5 percent, down from 93.7 percent in 2022), reading email (85.5 percent, down from 86.9 percent in 2022), and reading social media posts (84.6 percent, down from 86.9 percent in 2022). There was also a 15 percent rise in reading printed books: 65.2 percent (compared to 50.4 percent in 2022). Reading of ebooks (39.7 percent, up from 26 percent in 2022), audiobooks 28.4 percent (up from 16.4 percent in 2022), and webnovels/Webtoon 26.8 percent (up from 16.8 percent in 2022) all show greater than 10 percent gains. But hunger for story content isn’t just escapist: The second most popular thing to read is online news services at 41.6 percent (up from 35.9 percent in 2022); newspapers saw a gain of 10 percent, up to 24.3 percent from 14.1 percent in 2022. The desire to talk with friends about a book motivates 21.7 percent, up 9 percent from 12.7 percent in 2022.

To what can we attribute the significant jump in reading print books and identifying as readers, especially when we consider that the percentages of people identifying as a gamer, fan, and writer all remained relatively unchanged? The #1 and #2 reasons why Gen Z people read are “me time” (49.4 percent, from 42.4 percent in 2022) and “escape to a different world” (43.6 percent, up 10 percent from 34.1 percent in 2022). Given the significant changes in American life in 2025 – including significant shifts in civic policies and government institutions, and changes in the workplace as a result of generative AI, the desire to “escape” makes sense. “It’s noteworthy that the word stressful appears in our iGen corpus with unusually high frequency compared with broader language use,” observe Katz et al.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Gen Z stress has only been augmented since Katz et al. collected their data.

Headlines such as “Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle” in the New York Times, August 10, 2025, channel anxiety about how generative AI changes the demand for entry-level, college-educated knowledge workers. “As companies like Amazon and Microsoft lay off workers and embrace A.I. coding tools, computer science graduates say they’re struggling to land tech jobs.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Amazon, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft have all announced layoffs in 2025. Layoffs in the tech sector augment Gen Z’s preexisting fears that their employment prospects will never yield the financial milestones of their parents’ generation, such as owning a home or being able to afford to live in a city of their choice.

In our 2025 data, 70.9 percent of Gen Z women and 58.9 percent of men read at least one print book in the previous twelve months. Increases in reading identity and behavior suggest that reading may be a tactical coping technique, a boost to mental health that’s affordable, portable, immediate, and, in the print format, private. It can prompt conversation in-person or in specific sub-communities, can be made broadly public via posts on networking sites, or, as Beth Driscoll asserts in What Readers Do, be a distinctive self-care “project that sees readers marshaling and configuring some of their aesthetic and moral practices in order to create private, intimate experiences that restore and deepen a sense of self and provide resources for living.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The rise in preference for print books makes sense for a generation that’s wary of “black box” algorithms that feed on unfathomable quantities of personalized data collected and collated across platforms.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The preference for print books above digital formats can be understood as a resistance to the datafication of their reading behaviors and a nourishing escape from the screen-based reading that defines work and school life.

Moral Valence of Escape into Print Books

As knowledge work transpires almost exclusively in digital settings, the act of reading a printed book for pleasure can be an “urge to react against moral duty,” observes Driscoll.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ She cites literary studies scholar Nicholas Dames, who argues that the “psychological processes of novel-reading … are continually being recruited into contemporary debates about literature and civic virtue, which not only potentially distort and misrepresent the actual rhythms and practices of novel-reading, but also construct dubious ethical hierarchies.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ Gen Z prefer genres that offer clear escapism, such as speculative fiction, romance, and fantasy.Footnote ¹⁷² By choosing reading as a personal pleasure in a printed format, a Gen Z individual is primed to find comfort, solitude, and stress reduction.

Gen Z are sometimes belittled by older generations as “snowflakes” who defer or decline rites of passage such as getting a driver’s license at age sixteen or declining to pair up in committed relationships. In this context of implied generational and maturational benchmarks, the moral freight of reading a printed book for pleasure can be understood as self-care: A pursuit of “me time” and “escape to a different world” are the two most frequent reasons Gen Z read books. “Stories about private reading can be too smoothly put to work in support of liberal-humanist projects. Narratives about private reading should be interrupted by evidence of granular, uneven, surprising practices. Private, silent reading is not the ultimate achievement of Western democracy, but rather a practice that exists alongside others and is shaped by what’s around it.”Footnote ¹⁷³

Readers have slightly higher fan and gamer salience scores than not-a-readers. People who are avid consumers in one media identity tend to have an appetite for media in other settings, too. In 2023, we dubbed these people “media omnivores.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Our 2025 data show that 54 percent of readers identify as gamers but only 45 percent of not-a-readers identify as gamers. About 30 percent of readers identify as writers, but only 14.3 percent of not-a-readers identify as writers. And, 44.2 percent of readers identify as fans, but only 28.3 percent of not-a-readers identify as fans. Such involvement in one’s media identity suggests it might generate a feeling of purpose for the personal satisfaction it brings or the communities to which those identities often give access.

Gen Z and “Declines” in Reading

Given how much time, money, and scientific acumen are expended on measuring benchmarks of reading, it’s surprising how little these benchmarks tell us about the context of reading today, which is post-digital. The condition of post-digitality is almost never addressed in these survey questions. Fuller and Rehberg-Sedo’s MMR³ is a good example of the nuance that contextual thick descriptions can bring to quantified measurements of reading. The “socially situated reader involved in reading as a social practice” whose “habits of reading are shaped by a post-digital reality where analogue and digital technologies are often entangled rather than binary opposites”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ isn’t accommodated in two recent quantitative studies, the American Time Use SurveyFootnote ¹⁷⁶ and The National Endowment for the Arts’ Arts Participation Patterns in 2022. As with the limitations of Twenge’s method, which compares Gen Z’s survey responses to those of previous generations’ stretching back to 1972, some longitudinal studies of reading center the codex book (and magazines, in the ATUS study) as primary sites of reading. Gen Z’s post-digital reading practices (see Section 1) distort the wellness check that these longitudinal measurements are meant to signal.

At issue is how to define what counts as “reading.” We were buoyed to see the US National Endowment for the Arts’ “How Do We Read? Let’s Count the Ways” surveyFootnote ¹⁷⁷ and the arts participation patterns studyFootnote ¹⁷⁸ expand its definition of reading to include accessing books via digital methods, that is, ebooks and audiobooks. The NEA data for “Reading and/or listening to books and literature” show that 51.9 percent read and/or listened to books in 2022, a 3 percent decrease since 2017.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ To us, this looks like remarkable persistence, given that the base of American social media users grew by 41 million people between 2017 and 2022, a growth rate of 16.5 percent.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ A 3 percent decline in that context – which is just one competitor to books, let alone the growth in viewers of streaming services – seems like a victory for reading. But the press release about the report elegiacally declares: “Federal Data on Reading for Pleasure: All Signs Show a Slump.”Footnote ¹⁸¹

Beyond format and non-leisure reading, the main thing missing from these other accounts of reading frequency is that they do not include partial reading, or the DNF – did not finish. Reading completion data is scarce, and for this reason, worry over “declines” in reading takes shape around a notion of reading that is more aspirational than accurate. Publishers and authors have never been able to track what readers do with books beyond point-of-sale, especially print books. This challenge was ameliorated in part by tracking software that could be added to ebooks, which was the specific aim of a circa-2016 startup called Jellybooks that aimed to provide publishers with reader completion data on par with reader completion data owned by ebook retailers such as Amazon, Apple, and Barnes and Noble. It’s worth noting that Amazon developed its own publishing company with fifteen different imprints: extensive reader completion data gleaned from their Kindle app is the key differentiator that would make their publishing house profitable. It’s a market advantage no publisher can match.

Jellybooks’ reader completion data gathering revealed that surprisingly small percentages of people read books start-to-finish. Two hundred ARCs [advance reader copies] from seven publishers (one major US publisher, three British publishers, and three German publishers) used Jellybooks to market test books on the cusp of launching. The ebook ARCs with embedded tracking software were distributed to hundreds of readers who received ARCs as an incentive for permitting their reading to be tracked. As reported in the New York Times,

While Jellybooks’ experiments don’t capture actual market conditions (no backlist books were tested, for example; people who allow their reading to be tracked in exchange for ARCs may not be representative of the broader population of book consumers), Jellybooks’ reading (in)completion data revealed limitations underpinning assumptions about reading: that when a reader buys or borrows a book, that it will be read completely. There’s no way to track completion in printed books, and ebook retailers do not share reader completion data with the public or their customers, publishers. Reader (in)completion data sheds light on the valences underpinning “declines” in reading as tacit markers of legitimacy where reading that results in DNF somehow does not “count.”

In our own data gathering, we are driven by an ethos of inclusion to capture a wide range of reading behaviors that might accurately depict the reading-and-media ecosystem. This entailed imagining what kinds of medial settings were attracting readers, reviewing them to validate they merited inclusion, and crafting questions that would be recognized as apt to those users. For example, on the list of “things you read,” we included Super Chats on YouTube livestreams, a feature that allows viewers to pay for a highlighted and pinned message that gets the attention of the livestream talent. Including Super Chats, Discord and Twitch chats, fanfic, and serial reading sites like Wattpad and Radish, also conveyed to our survey participants non-judgment and acceptance of reading practices and communities beyond the codex. We also gathered data about reading text messages and emails, even though these didn’t pertain to books or media properties per se. It naturalized reading, conveying to survey respondents that we weren’t invested in definitions of reading that reinscribe status, such as reading literary fiction for leisure. Capturing the full reading-and-media ecosystem empowered us as researchers to reliably situate codex reading in an ecosystem closer to people’s lived medial experiences.

Our wide consideration set yielded some surprising results. In 2022, Gen Z preferred print over digital formats – which in 2025 is significantly greater. Gathering granular data about both behavior and identity allowed us to discern that so-called pirates are also superconsumers: more likely than the general population to buy books in multiple formats, visit libraries, identify as readers, and support artists through the purchase of merch (merchandise). None of this activity would have been visible had we constrained our data capture to traditional book formats.

An expansive view of reading “engagement” allows us to listen to Gen Z on their own terms rather than trying to fit their behaviors into legacy categories. A narrower definition of “reading” would be more likely to miss the full context of how Gen Z people read, and our interest wasn’t to gauge literacy in the manner implied by Pew’s longitudinal study of American adult book reading, which centers on “reading a book in whole or in part.” It’s worth noting that Pew’s 2021 survey was conducted by telephone, a mode that risks introducing bias based on who does and does not answer a live telephone call, which can disproportionately impact Gen Z respondents.Footnote ¹⁸³

The National Endowment for the Arts has gathered data about reading for pleasure for more than 20 years.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ It is the standard-bearer for data about pleasure reading in the United States. Bone et al. used recent NEA surveys as the basis for their inclusion of reading in digital formats (ebook and audiobook), specifically the 2020 NEA report How Do We Read? Let’s Count the Ways: Comparing Digital, Audio and Print-Only Readers. One finding in How Do We Read is that “print-only readers engage with and support the arts more than nonreaders do, but they consistently report lower levels of support than digital/audio readers.” Digital/audio readers also engage the print format, but the NEA report essentially siloes print reading by gathering data about “print-only” reading, which shows the lowest use (18.6 percent ) of any format (26, fig. 4) for Gen Z. This datum from NEA isolates print-based reading (“print-only”) in a way that distorts the uses and value of print that our surveys from 2022 and 2025 disclose. The NEA and, by extension, the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) research team, who used NEA’s definitions, are not primed to capture data about the full scope of Gen Z reading because they didn’t manifest an understanding of post-digital reading practices.

In a press release announcing findings of the ATUS study “The Decline in Reading for Pleasure over 20 Years of the American Time Use Survey,” published August 2025, study co-author Jill Sonke declares that yearly 3 percent drops in recorded reading duration over the twenty years of the survey “is not just a small dip – it’s a sustained, steady decline,” a “loss” she finds “significant and deeply concerning.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ ATUS records activities over one 24-hour “diary day.” If a person read for one minute or more, the interviewer noted it in the diary. The survey’s definition of “reading” includes time spent reading printed books or magazines, reading on a Kindle or other e-reader, and listening to audiobooks; but such data actually measures time in the platform (Kindle, Audible, etc.) rather than reading, which is not necessarily the same. The daily diary method is intended to reduce recall bias, but in not updating reading modalities to include current practices and contexts of post-digital reading, the researchers introduce sociodemographic inequalities.

In the absence of data about post-digital reading, the ATUS findings about Gen Z are only partially valid at best: “The extent of the [reading] decrease in our study is surprising given that the ATUS definition of reading for personal interest included not only just reading a book, magazine, or newspaper but also listening to audiobooks/books on tapes and reading on a Kindle or other e-reader.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The ATUS researchers acknowledge the limitations of their conception of where and how reading transpires: “[R]eading on tablets, computers, or smartphones was not explicitly included in examples, making it unclear whether this behavior would have been classified as reading for personal interest or technology use. Our reading measures are thus unlikely to have included activities, such as reading blogs or the news online, which may be a form of reading for pleasure.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Thus they acknowledge that their report “does not provide information on why people read, or whether they participated in a book club, which is likely to have greater impacts on reading behaviors, as well as social and wellbeing outcomes.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Our research in this Element fills in those aporia as they pertain to Gen Z, which comprised 17 percent of the ATUS population. ATUS researchers call specifically for “future [ATU] surveys to capture these types of reading”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ as well as a deeper look into borrowing/checking out/returning books and browsing at public libraries. In this section, we make the case that public libraries are “third spaces” that contribute to Gen Z well-being and provide a cost-free means to read books and engage with others about media and culture.

We’d love to see longitudinal studies of reading like ATUS include questions that see Gen Z as readers with generationally unique aptitude and skill. For example, scholars of longitudinal studies of reading could minimize bias against post-digital readers by integrating assessment metrics that account for non-traditional reading formats alongside traditional ones. Bone et al. identify “digital culture as one possible contributing factor” in the decline of book reading, but that’s as far as their speculation goes. Decontextualized data has the potential to distort how people understand Gen Z reading. The press release headline announcing the ATUS findings declares that “reading for pleasure [is] in free fall. New study finds 40 percent drop over two decades.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ It may prompt Gen Z people to wonder if they are at risk of experiencing the social harms the study connects diminished reading to, which include economic insecurity, a loss of leisure time, and diminished mental well-being.

Social Media Use

Gen Z are media omnivores who discover and consume story content across multiple media platforms, formats, and devices.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Simultaneous engagement with multiple media at a particular instance of time is referred to as “media multitasking.”Footnote ¹⁹² From our vantage, media multitasking is situational and involves varying degrees of intention and attention. “Since individuals generally watch entertainment intentionally, and are not likely to benefit from media multitasking because cognitive overload would occur and the entertainment experience would be diminished, we hypothesize that the entertainment genre is associated with low levels of media multitasking.”Footnote ¹⁹³ That assertion was truer of TV viewing ten years ago than it is today, when 74 percent of Gen Z use subtitles when watching videos in public.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

Voorveld and Viswanathan observed three elements that influenced attention: genre, part-of-day, and social viewing. Voorveld and Viswanthan’s hypothesis that the greater the cognitive demand for immersion (e.g. in a story world), the lower the likelihood of media multitasking implies that people mindfully choose technological use. We add to this by noting that Gen Z understand their attention is scarce and commoditized: “The readers in our group had some awareness of [social media companies’] commercially driven data harvesting practices and the organizations that were profiting from them,” observe Fuller and Rehberg Sedo.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Gen Z’s awareness of social media’s surveillance capitalist logic makes them wary, but use is still high.

In our 2025 data, YouTube use grew by 12 percent: 90.8 percent compared to 78.8 percent in 2022. Instagram and TikTok use also grew: 79 percent used Instagram in 2025, compared to 76.2 percent in 2022; 71 percent used TikTok compared to 67.1 percent in 2022. Reddit use grew 6.2 percent, to 35 percent compared to 28.8 percent in 2022. The #1 preferred apps were YouTube (28.7 percent) and TikTok (29.3 percent). YouTube preference rose by an astonishing 12.7 percent.

When do Gen Z people use social media? The #1 use case is before bed (66.5 percent), two-thirds of the general population. Medical researchers of sleep assessment Yu et al. call for future studies to “investigate the directionality and causality of the complex relationships among social media use, sleep, and mental health.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ The correlation between use of social media before bed and sleep disturbance is high,Footnote ¹⁹⁷ and insufficient sleep is “highly prevalent” among young adults.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Approximately 63.6 percent looked at social media while waiting, and the three following use cases for social media all hover around the 50 percent mark: during meals (55.1 percent), to learn news in the world (53.4 percent), if I want to know what someone I follow is doing (53.2 percent), while getting ready for work or school (50 percent).

Waning Trust in Social Media

There was a large decrease in the use of social media to get books between 2022 and 2025. In 2025 the #1 way people got books was at bookstores (30.8 percent), compared to 9.6 percent in 2022. The local public library was #2 at 23.5 percent, compared to 15.5 percent in 2022. Online bookstores also increased significantly to 21.6 percent, compared to 8.9 percent in 2022 – a 12.7 percent jump. This indicates that the waning trust is specific to social media, not digital culture or ecommerce. Gen Z reported slight decreases in buying a book because of BookTok or Bookstagram. BookTok is almost 17 percent more effective than Bookstagram: of people who use BookTok, 43.9 percent of women and 23.4 percent of men bought a book from BookTok in 2025, compared to 27.3 percent of women and 23.3 percent of men who bought something from Bookstagram. In the general population, BookTok use mostly held its ground at 33.5 percent compared to 34.4 percent in 2022, but use of Bookstagram fell from 28.7 percent in 2022 to 25.1 percent in 2025, a loss of 3.6 percent. More men bought a book because of a livestream (26.3 percent) than because of either BookTok or Bookstagram; but in general, there’s a lower instance of persuadability among men to purchase, prompted by online content, compared to women. While it’s likely that the BookTok sales juggernaut is past its peak,Footnote ¹⁹⁹ it remains the most influential of the platforms in sales conversion.

Influencers and talent as motivators of book discovery dropped in 2025, in the case of talent precipitously so. In the general population, 32.9 percent found a book because of an influencer in 2025 compared to 34.2 percent in 2022, a relatively small drop of 1.3 percent. But finding a book because of talent fell by more than half in 2025: 15.1 percent compared to 32.9 percent in 2022. It is possible that Colleen Hoover had an outsized effect on this datum; in 2022, she had six of the top ten spots on the New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list, and eight of her titles were on the overall bestseller list for the year. A more reliable index of the falling efficacy of influencers is how many Gen Z chose influencers as the #1 way to discover books: in 2025, it was 7.3 percent compared to 11 percent in 2022, a drop of 3.7 percent.

Why is social media less influential in the discovery and purchase of books in 2025 than in 2022? In the interval between our two studies, social media’s dark side, particularly its harmful effect on young girls, became widely known. “A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men,” appeared as a cover story in the Sunday New York Times (online version Thursday, February 22, 2024).Footnote ²⁰⁰ Reporters analyzed 2.1 million Instagram posts, monitored months of online chats of professed pedophiles, and interviewed over 100 people, including parents and children. Follow-up articles by the same reporters in May 2024, November 2024, and December 2024 provide more evidence of the significant harm to young girls presented by Instagram’s lax or nonexistent enforcement of safety guidelines.Footnote ²⁰¹ “The reason why our generation is so messed up and has higher anxiety and depression than our parents is because we have to deal with social media,” said one UK girl quoted in internal Facebook documentation leaked by Haugen. [Facebook, now Meta, owns Instagram.] “Everyone feels like they have to be perfect” (2019; released 2021).

“Social connection is a fundamental human need,” observes the former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, “as essential to survival as food, water, and shelter” (9). When used mindfully, social media can connect people in ways that benefit well-being, such as video chatting or maintaining a text thread to connect with friends or loved ones. “It’s a bit of a motivator, kind of like a good thing to look forward to, I guess, in the sense of there’s going to be funny, new information waiting for me on my phone,” after completing tasks like homework or a shift at work.Footnote ²⁰² But social media’s harms occupied more of the US national conversation from 2022 to 2025, which may account for social media’s waning influence in Gen Z book recommendations and purchases in 2025.

Gen Z’s Increased Use of Libraries

As reliance on social media recommendations via influencers and talent decreased, Gen Z increased use of public libraries and consulted librarians for book recommendations in greater numbers than in 2022. In a dramatic upturn, growth in use of physical libraries shot up to two-thirds of the general population (66.9 percent up from 54.4 percent in 2022), a 12.5 percent growth. More than one-third of the general population sought librarian recommendations (35.6 percent compared to 15.1 percent in 2022), a remarkable 20.5 percent increase. Men (37.1 percent) are more likely than women (32.8 percent) to seek a librarian recommendation.

Almost two-thirds of Gen Z who visit libraries – 64.3 percent – borrow books and other items; borrowing is the #1 preferred activity in the library for nearly half of the general population (47.8 percent), compared to 38.7 percent in 2022, a 9.1 percent increase. The second and third most preferred activities at a library, studying for school (28.7 percent) and working on my laptop (29 percent), fall more than thirty percentage points below borrowing items. This indicates that libraries still have work to do in communicating to Gen Z the range of services they offer. Quiet and frugality are libraries’ main attractions to Gen Z. Approximately 54.9 percent said they visit the library because it’s a quiet space. And, 48.6 percent visit because it costs nothing; 44.9 percent use libraries to save money on books and entertainment.

Libraries as Third Spaces

In our 2025 data, 46.8 percent of the general Gen Z population wish they had more places to relax outside their home. This finding is significant because it may reflect Gen Z implicitly seeking a remedy for indexing higher for loneliness than older generations.Footnote ²⁰³ Gen Z who use libraries are less likely to be lonely, our data found. Higher loneliness scores are associated with lower odds of visiting a physical library. For each 1-unit increase in loneliness score, the odds of visiting a physical library decrease by about 27 percent.

Unstructured or self-structured time is part of the library’s appeal as a third space. In our ethnographic work at two libraries in Cuyahoga County in the US state of Ohio,Footnote ²⁰⁴ we observed school-age Gen Z (one group of high schoolers, one group of middle schoolers) socializing free from prescribed roles and responsibilities such as “student” or “employee.” In the high school group, one young woman brought her toddler-aged daughter to the crafting session; the young woman’s mother, the toddler’s grandmother, took care of the child while the young woman participated in the crafting and conversation. While making bookmarks, another young woman discussed her entrepreneurial plans to “build a lip gloss business using vegan products because those products are in-demand with other Gen Zers and because vegan products are more sustainable for the environment.”Footnote ²⁰⁵ We observed middle schoolers improvisationally circuiting between structured beading time co-led by a youth librarian and an adult volunteer mentor to unstructured gameplay and conversation, to quiet moments of alone time on their phones or browsing the hundreds of books that lined the shelves of the teen space. “The village-like feeling of third places can reduce people’s anxieties and make them more comfortable with trying a new social experience.”Footnote ²⁰⁶

Contexts for Increased Library Use

Contexts that may explain the significant uptick in library use and perceived relevance include the rise of book bans across the United States, which may have inclined Gen Z to seek professional recommendations and guidance, and Gen Z’s increased use of third spaces. What might have made libraries feel especially welcoming or safe? In our ethnographic research at two public libraries in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, we learned that Gen Z high school students feel public libraries convey a sense of safety. Some students talked about walking through metal detectors and security checks to enter their high schools. Their libraries had no metal detectors.

Just as Gen Z people have never known a world without the internet, so too have American Gen Z people never known a world without gun violence in schools. The first school shooting massacre in Columbine, Colorado (1999) maps onto the earliest years of the oldest Gen Z (1997–2012). Gun violence would seem to be far removed from how Gen Z discover and consume books. But almost all children enrolled in American public schools – 95 percent – have been trained in “active shooter drills,” survival techniques should the campus go into lockdown.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Millions of Gen Z have repeatedly practiced hiding in locked classrooms and preparing what to do if an armed gunman enters. This frames school as a potentially unsafe space. Between 1997 and 2022, the United States has had fifty-seven times as many school shootings as all other major industrialized nations combined.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Fear of gun violence, which has not increased in frequency but has become more deadly,Footnote ²⁰⁹ is a relevant context for understanding why libraries are more valued in 2025 than in 2022.

Conclusion

“Technology is not the villain it’s often made out to be,” observe researchers representing an international team of more than 100 experts who undertook the first systematic effort to develop evidence-based guidelines for social connection. “Passive scrolling can harm well-being, but active, intentional use can strengthen bonds … The key is using technology to facilitate real connection rather than replace it.”Footnote ²¹⁰

The data in this section have demonstrated that Gen Z who identify as readers are also using social media apps and consuming stories across media. Preferring print books, Gen Z seek out material and embodied experiences, punctuating “always on” digital culture with high-impact oases of in-person community and mindful tech use. “Prioritizing meaningful interactions” is another of the recommendations from the 100 experts developing guidelines for social connection. Using libraries as third spaces and elevating librarian recommendations to the third most-preferred way to find books, Gen Z engaged in meaningful interactions. They benefit from in-person librarian (and bookstore) recommendations because these are, by definition, novel and unpredictable when compared to the straightforward retrieval of digital search. “Studies show that weak ties provide novel information, unexpected opportunities and a broader sense of belonging that close friends alone can’t provide.”Footnote ²¹¹ In a library, conversations with strangers are wrapped in a warm blanket of familiarity because third-space geniality and tacit rules of social conduct provide soothing predictability.

Former Surgeon General Murthy cited a study that Gen Z people aged 15 to 24 spend significantly less time engaging socially in-person with friends – a drop of nearly 70 percent, from roughly 150 minutes per day in 2003 to 40 minutes per day in 2020.Footnote ²¹² But as we noted in reference to longitudinal studies of reading, it’s important to be a little skeptical about mapping post-digital behaviors onto pre-mobile-computing benchmarks. In 2003, it would be four more years before mobile phones were invented and twelve years before they became the dominant way people access the internet. In 2003, most Americans accessed the internet from a specific room in their house or office using a dial-up modem and telephone lines. These medial conditions are not incidental. They imply a different set of expectations about how time, social connection, and leisure should work. The ease and precision of digitally sharing calendars, an affordance of mobile computing, has made it possible for children to be far more scheduled into after-school and weekend activities. Presumably, children may engage with some friends at these activities. It’s unclear how a longitudinal study with questions established in 2003 would capture the data to represent this kind of sociability. While it’s useful to compare how engagement with friends has changed over time, we need to be thoughtful as we map pre-mobile-computing behaviors onto this cultural moment.

As Gen Z turn to printed books for “me time” and to “escape into a different world,” they are cultivating self-care practices that balance the relaxing affordances of print and the expansive, modular communities of multimodal social reading. These practices are resilient.