Readers have been dreading the rise of e-books since before the technology even existed. A 1991 New York Times piece predicting the imminent invention of the personal e-reader spurred angry and impassioned letters to the editor. One reader wrote in to express his worry that the new electronic books wouldn't work in the bath.

Twenty-three years later, half of American adults own an e-reading device. A few years ago, Obama set a goal of getting e-textbooks into every classroom by 2017. Florida lawmakers have passed legislation requiring public schools to convert their textbooks to digital versions.

Despite the embrace of e-books in certain contexts, they remain controversial. Many people just don’t like them: They run out of battery, they hurt your eyes, they don’t work in the bath. After years of growth, sales are stagnating. In 2014, 65 percent of 6 to 17-year-old children said they would always want to read books in print—up from 60 percent two years earlier.

Though it has been over 15 years since Project Gutenberg starting publishing classic literature online and seven since Amazon launched the Kindle, research into how e-books change readers’ experience has been scarce. Defenders of print books usually rely on anecdote or intuition—which can make it easy to dismiss them as Luddites or romantics. And the relative lack of data has sometimes forced them to resort to the hyperbolic—Andrew Piper proclaiming that e-reading isn’t reading at all—or the petty—Peter Conrad complaining that e-readers don’t align margins the way he likes. With her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, brings more data to the case for print. Baron and her colleagues surveyed over 300 university students in the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Slovakia, and found a near-universal preference for print, especially for serious reading. (She finds that the format doesn’t matter so much for “light reading.”) When students were given a choice of various media—including hard copy, cell phone, tablet, e-reader, and laptop—92 percent said they could concentrate best in hard copy.

“The group we assumed would gobble this up were teenagers and young adults,” says Baron. “But they talked about things I didn’t think 18 to 26-year-olds cared about anymore.”