There is a familiar way to tell the story of Gen Z and reading. Young people grew up with smartphones, social media and an endless supply of short-form video, so books lost the competition for their attention. The story is tidy, intuitively plausible and reinforced every time somebody looks across a waiting room and sees a row of people staring into phones instead of paperbacks. It also may be measuring the wrong things.
On September 22, OCLC’s WebJunction is hosting Portland State University professors Kathi Inman Berens and Rachel Noorda for a presentation titled “How Gen Z Use and Don’t Use Public Libraries: New Data and Analysis.” The session draws on their 2025 data about Gen Z library use, placed alongside longitudinal survey findings, ethnographic research and conversations with librarians.
WebJunction’s description highlights increases in library use and trust in librarian recommendations, but the more revealing part of the project may be the contradiction embedded in its central questions: how can a generation whose book discovery is deeply shaped by digital platforms still value libraries, print books and human recommendations, and why do some people who demonstrably read hesitate to call themselves readers?
That contradiction is not new to Berens and Noorda’s work. Their 2026 Cambridge University Press book, “How Gen Z Discover and Consume Books,” draws on nationally representative U.S. surveys from 2022 and 2025 and describes Gen Z reading as a set of overlapping behaviors rather than a clean migration from old media to new.
The researchers identify a preference for print alongside digital discovery, a gap between reading behavior and reader identity, and a media environment in which books move through algorithms, peer recommendations, adaptations, social communities and traditional institutions at the same time.
The older data already made the problem with the standard narrative visible. In their 2022 survey, conducted for an American Library Association report published in 2023, 54 percent of Gen Z and millennial respondents said they had visited a physical library during the previous 12 months.
More than half of those physical-library visitors also borrowed from digital collections, and respondents read and bought roughly twice as many print books per month as books in other formats. Those findings did not describe a generation choosing between the library and the internet. They described people moving between them.
That distinction matters because much of the anxiety around young people and reading assumes that the container tells us what is happening inside it. A person holding a paperback is visibly reading. A person holding a phone could be scrolling social media, reading a novel, listening to an audiobook while following supplemental material, discussing a book with other readers, looking up an author, borrowing an ebook, reading fan fiction or discovering the next book they will eventually buy in print. From across the room, all of those behaviors look exactly the same: somebody is on their phone.
The same problem appears when we ask people whether they are “readers.” Reader is not merely a description of an activity. It can function as an identity, complete with cultural expectations about what kinds of books count, how often someone should read, whether audiobooks qualify, whether fan fiction belongs in the category, whether abandoning books is permitted and whether a sufficiently serious reader ought to have a bookshelf that can be photographed. Someone can regularly consume stories and information through several formats while still deciding that the label belongs to somebody else.
Berens and Noorda’s work is useful because it treats that gap as something worth examining instead of correcting. If reported behavior and self-identification do not match, the interesting question is not necessarily which answer is wrong. It may be what the label has come to mean. A young person who reads several books a year but spends more time talking about games, music or television may not think “reader” describes them.
Another person may consume audiobooks during a commute but mentally file listening somewhere outside reading. Someone else may discover nearly every book through TikTok or Instagram and therefore feel disconnected from an older image of literary culture even while participating enthusiastically in book culture itself.
Public libraries become particularly interesting in that environment because they no longer occupy only one point in the reading process. The traditional picture of the library is straightforward: a person wants a book, goes to a building and borrows it. The contemporary library can be a physical gathering place, a digital lending service, a recommendation source, an event venue, a community institution and an entry point into books that were first encountered somewhere else.
A title can begin as a thirty-second video, become a hold in a library app, arrive as a physical book and end as a conversation with friends. Trying to classify that journey as either digital or traditional misses how thoroughly the two now overlap.
There is also something quietly important about WebJunction emphasizing growing trust in librarian recommendations. Gen Z came of age inside recommendation systems. Spotify recommends music, Netflix recommends shows, TikTok decides what appears next, retailers predict what someone might buy and social platforms continuously reorganize attention around inferred preference.
Against that background, the librarian is almost an antique recommendation technology: a human being who can ask a follow-up question, understand why the last book worked, notice hesitation and recommend something without needing the interaction to maximize time on platform.
That does not make algorithms bad or librarians magically objective. It does make the coexistence of the two revealing. Gen Z can discover books through an algorithm and still value a human recommendation. It can spend enormous amounts of time in digital spaces and still use a physical library. It can prefer print while relying on digital systems to decide which print book is worth finding. These are contradictions only if we assume media habits must line up neatly on opposing sides.
They usually do not. People stream vinyl-era albums and then buy the record. They discover restaurants through social media and then seek the most old-fashioned dining room they can find. They use navigation apps to reach hiking trails where they hope not to look at a screen for several hours. Digital discovery does not automatically imply digital consumption, and heavy technology use does not necessarily eliminate the desire for physical objects, physical places or human guidance. Sometimes the abundance of digital choice makes those things more valuable.
That may be part of what libraries are offering Gen Z. A library is one of the few remaining places where browsing does not require purchasing, staying does not require ordering another drink, and curiosity does not immediately become a commercial signal. It can participate in digital culture without being reducible to it. The institution can lend an ebook through an app and, at the same time, provide the physical room in which someone can read without being expected to become a customer.
The larger lesson is not that the panic over reading is entirely imaginary. Berens and Noorda’s work does not establish that every concern about attention, literacy or declining reading time is misplaced. Their 2026 book instead describes a fragmented, multimodal environment in which the boundaries among formats and forms of media are increasingly permeable. That makes simple measurements less satisfying, but it also makes them less reliable as explanations of what young people are actually doing.
If we count only the behavior that looks like our inherited picture of reading, we should not be surprised when reading appears to disappear. If we define a reader as someone sitting quietly with a printed book, we will miss the person listening to one, borrowing one digitally, discussing one online, reading fiction outside the commercial book market or discovering a print title through a platform that supposedly killed reading. The activity did not necessarily vanish simply because the route became harder to recognize.
The more useful question, then, is not whether Gen Z saved reading or destroyed it. It is whether the categories we use to describe reading still match the culture in which reading now occurs. WebJunction’s presentation is compelling precisely because it starts from the messy version of the question: how Gen Z use libraries and how they do not; when they behave like readers and when they claim the identity; when an algorithm matters and when a librarian does.
Perhaps the surprise is not that a generation raised on screens still goes to libraries. The surprise is that we expected one technology to erase the other. Gen Z may be showing us something considerably less dramatic and more human: people assemble habits from whatever works. They can scroll and read, stream and borrow, trust an algorithm for discovery and a librarian for judgment.
Once those behaviors are allowed to coexist, the supposed contradiction begins to look less like a contradiction at all.
SOURCE NOTES
• OCLC WebJunction: “How Gen Z Use and Don’t Use Public Libraries: New Data and Analysis,” Sept. 22, 2026. Event description states that Berens and Noorda present 2025 data, longitudinal survey findings, ethnographic research and librarian conversations, with increases in library use and trust in librarian recommendations. https://www.webjunction.org/events/webjunction/gen-z-use.html
• Cambridge University Press: Kathi Inman Berens and Rachel Noorda, “How Gen Z Discover and Consume Books,” published online July 23, 2026. Summary describes nationally representative U.S. surveys from 2025 (n=2,000) and 2022 (n=2,075), preference for print alongside digital discovery, and dissonance between reader identity and behavior. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/how-gen-z-discover-and-consume-books/070F92C1F5A86ECC181F192C898B692F
• American Library Association: 2023 report announcement on Berens and Noorda’s earlier survey: 54% of Gen Z and millennials visited a physical library in the prior 12 months; more than half of physical-library visitors also borrowed digitally; respondents read and bought about twice as many print books per month as other formats. https://www.ala.org/news/2019/12/new-ala-report-gen-z-millennials-are-visiting-library-prefer-print-books
Research findings attributed to OCLC WebJunction, Cambridge University Press, and American Library Association materials cited in SOURCE NOTES. Cultural framing is RMN's.