The most fascinating and, in many ways, cheering story of 2014 is almost wholly counterintuitive: the survival of the printed book. Turning pages back from digital grave shock! Legacy longform wins fight for life! Robert McCrum told part of the tale a couple of weeks back as he chronicled Waterstones’ battle into renewed profit. But you – the reader – seem to be writing new chapters month by month and Christmas by Christmas.

Nothing, of course, is settled as the broadband revolution rushes on. There is no conclusion, because there is no end to technical change. But one can, at least, reach an interim verdict. Five or so years ago, as Kindles, Nooks and the rest rode a surge of sales, you could find plenty of pundits and publishers shrugging despondently. Here we go again… We knew that conventional newspapers were supposed to be dying, like the forests they depended on. We knew that magazines were on the critical list. Who’d suppose that hard and soft covers would be any different?

But this is a human story. It involves human beings doing what they, often cussedly, do. And so all of the graphs and growth charts don ’t really matter – because, after a while, they reached a plateau. The rise of the ebook paused at around 30% of total customer sales, and stayed there. More, if you examine the underlying figures for, say, 2012 and 2013, stripping out the exceptional impact of Fifty Shades of Grey, then it is quite possible to conclude that the book-buying universe – digital and printed – is expanding, not contracting. It isn’t a question of either/or. It is a question of both: and a topic for particularly acute recent research from Enders Analysis.

Passionate book buyers don’t want to just click away. They like to stop and browse and shop, to wander from stack to stack looking for something unknown that will catch their fancy. Pottering around a book shop is an experience and an entertainment. Books are objects of interest, and engrossing desire. Arranged on a shelf by your desk, they help define you. Some of 20% of them – attention Santa! – are presents: more tangible than grey squirts on your Kindle. No wonder they rate high as children’s gifts: the kids’ market is basically untouched. No wonder, either, that the handsome, the glossy, the sumptuously illustrated survive in triumph.

Of course ebookery has its appeal: especially to women (a 57% bias), who can slip a Kindle in their handbags; to those with poor eyesight who need to make the type size bigger (50% of users are over 50; more than a quarter over 60); to holidaymakers watching their baggage weight; to those who seek out pulp and genre fiction; to readers of dodgy titles, where discretion is the better part of screen anonymity.

All of this is a big, defined business. But it is not, by any means, the whole of the publishing and bookselling business. And probably – as the Enders researchers conclude – it’s getting saturated pretty quickly. The plateau is real. And one sentence sums up an essential difference. “Targeting is not a solution for discovery, except in a technologist’s head. Discovery is motivated by an exemplary browsing environment, something that online is very poor at.”

Amazon and its online competitors can see where you’ve been cruising on the net. They know what you bought last time. They can crunch the numbers and target you again. But this runs counter to what book-lovers want. Thus, for the moment, the tide stops coming in. The printed word isn’t washed away. One chronicle of doom foretold is way out of time.

It’s tempting, of course, to extrapolate more widely: tempting, but foolish. One problem for the Kindle revolution is the tablet revolution that came just behind, providing a wide range of other diversions besides books available on a single screen – which, in turn, cuts into reading time itself. The tablet is enemy as well as friend: and no one can tell where technology will go to next. Nevertheless, the lessons of human behaviour linger when you edge a little further down the reading chain.

The end of printed magazines? Sales – especially via single purchases rather than subscriptions – are drooping. Picking up a copy of something on a whim to fill in an idle hour or three doesn’t work so well in a tablet world. Areas of net supremacy are evident: goodbye printed lads’ mags. The option of moving publication substantially or completely online doesn’t exist for weeklies or monthlies that are topic- based (as opposed to news-driven). And price in an era of constraint matters hugely, whatever managers chasing a fatter profit may choose to believe.

But none of this means that a plateau or two won’t exist, that some areas will survive much better than others. Just pick up a glossy mag over December and watch a shower of brochures – browsing material – drop out. Sit back in your bath, and look at some great pictures or read a long, absorbing article at a pace that suits. Make a statement on your coffee table downstairs.

And newspapers? That’s much more problematic. The news comes quicker by screen and click. Entertainment, too – crosswords, TV listings, football fixtures, movie showings – is a mobile-plus zone. But there’s still a targeted trail where a browsing experience used to be. It’s automatic to pursue the things you’re already interested in, but not to stop and potter and find new interests. And, maybe, context – the judgment of setting one story line against another – is a sad loss, too. Why do 24-hour cable news channels attract tiny audiences? Why do viewers continue to tune in en masse at six and 10?

Questions without clear answers, of course. Questions that audiences will answer in their own way, whatever the pundits say. But questions that, at least on a cold day in Foyles, Waterstones or my packed local village store, have resonance to spare. Time to pull up a chair near the fire. Time to read a good book of the year.

■ A little stocktaking as the year ends. The last Audited Bureau of Circulation figures for November show that the Daily Mirror, selling 918,024 print copies a day, slid by 8.21% over the last 12 months. The Sun, selling 1,931,640, dropped 7.57%. The Mail, at 1,660,334, was 5.4% down. The Telegraph – 494,176 – fell by 9.22%. And the Guardian – 177,915 – lost 10.90%. The Independent’s 60,754 was 10.27% worse. The overall total was 7.63% below November 2013. Only the Times, 389,135 a day, was up, by 1.03%.

Turn on your laptop, tablet or mobile, though, andthe scorecard changes. The Mirror’s total of unique daily browsers around the world is 4,092,958, up 119.66%. The Mail has 12,532,566 – up 20.47%. The Telegraph – 3,667,904 – has risen by 20.9%. The Guardian – 6,041,232 uniques a day – is up 28.9%. The Indy, on 2,227,291, can boast a 73.25% lift. Who knows what had happened to the Times and Sun behind their paywalls? Those walls take the stock and stow them out of sight.

Oh! and don’t ask precise questions about money raised or lost either. We’re talking newspaper accounting here, not transparent information…