In conversations about literacy, it’s easy to hear “screen time” and assume the discussion is about distraction. But not all screen time is created equal. When students use purpose-built reading platforms designed to support literacy, accessibility, and choice, technology can become a powerful tool for building reading habits and expanding access to books.
Recently, we analyzed anonymized data from more than four million student users across the United States for our Sora Annual Report. The findings offer a fascinating bird’s-eye view of how students read today and challenge some common assumptions about digital reading.
During the 2024–2025 school year alone, students logged a staggering 349.6 million reading sessions, averaging 2.5 million hours of reading time per month. Activity rises sharply when the school bell rings in September (2.5 million hours), climbs steadily through the winter, peaks in March at 2.9 million hours, and tapers off as summer approaches.
These numbers demonstrate that screens are not automatically the enemy of the written word. In fact, when technology is intentionally designed for schools—incorporating strict student data privacy protections, seamless interoperability with school systems, and alignment with rigorous research standards (like an ESSA Level IV designation)—it can act as a powerful engine for equity and engagement.
Just as importantly, the data reveals that students are actively engaging with text in ways that support literacy growth.
Look no further than digital dictionary utilization. When encountering sophisticated vocabulary in their digital books, students actively clicked to define words. The top looked-up words in 2024-2025 included incredulous, surreptitiously, trepidation, impertinent, chagrin, and consternation. (Interestingly, the slang term sigma also made the top 15, proving that students are parsing modern cultural text just as closely!). These are moments of self-directed learning where stumbling blocks are transformed into vocabulary milestones because the tool to investigate was right at their fingertips.
Similarly, when Sora introduced customizable Reading Goals, more than 628,000 students set personal targets, with 20 minutes a day emerging as the most common choice. This aligns closely with literacy research showing that 15 to 30 minutes of daily independent reading, paired with strong instruction, can significantly improve reading proficiency. Since Sora launched in 2018, more than 21.3 million students have earned achievements in Sora, demonstrating how goal setting and milestone tracking can encourage persistence and exploration.
Of course, concerns about screen time remain valid. Schools are rightly evaluating when technology supports learning and when it creates distraction. But the more useful question isn’t whether students should read on screens or paper. It’s whether the tools they’re using help them engage meaningfully with text.
Meeting Students Where They Are: Choice and Formats
One of the most compelling insights from our data is that digital platforms provide a window into student choice and agency and help answer an important question: when given the opportunity to self-select, what are students actually reading?
The answer is a rich, messy, and entirely vibrant mix of popular culture and academic canon. On our global platform, ebooks remain the dominant format, making up 85% of the 59.6 million worldwide checkouts. But audiobooks (11%) and digital magazines (4%) continue to play an important role in how students access content.
When we look at the title-level data, a clear pattern emerges across age groups. Younger readers are heavily invested in graphic storytelling and highly serialized commercial fiction, including Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and Raina Telgemeier’s Sisters. For young adults, fantasy, dystopian fiction, romance, and mystery dominate checkout lists. Yet by high school, these popular titles coexist alongside classroom staples such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, and Animal Farm.
This duality tells us something important: choice reading and curriculum reading happily coexist in the digital world. When digital libraries provide instant, frictionless access to a broad catalog, students use them to satisfy classroom requirements and pursue their personal interests.
The Hidden Power of Audiobooks and Accessibility
For years, a stubborn skepticism persisted in some education circles that audiobooks “don’t really count” as reading. Fortunately, a growing body of research has challenged that assumption. Studies from institutions such as Harvard and MIT have highlighted how audiobooks can support language acquisition, vocabulary development, phonological awareness, and comprehension.
According to our annual report, audiobook checkouts reached 6.7 million. Audiobooks are not replacing ebooks; rather, they serve as a valuable complement. For auditory learners, students with dyslexia and other learning differences, and reluctant readers intimidated by large blocks of text, audiobooks can provide an accessible entry point into reading.
Digital platforms also offer a level of privacy and personalization that physical books cannot always match. A middle school student reading below grade level can adjust font sizes, modify lighting settings, or listen to an audiobook without the public stigma of carrying a “baby book” around the classroom. The interface becomes a safe space to build reading stamina.
Reducing Barriers for Multilingual and Lower-Income Learners
Perhaps the most compelling argument for school-focused literacy technology is its ability to broaden equity. Our data shows that books in Languages Other Than English (LOTE) are a substantial and growing segment of student reading behavior, with more than two million LOTE titles borrowed in 2024–2025—an 11% increase over the previous year. Remarkably, nearly a quarter of all Sora users borrowed at least one LOTE title.
Consider the experience of the Weber School District in Utah, featured as a case study in our report. Facing the challenge of supporting a rapidly diversifying student population whose native languages extended far beyond Spanish and Chinese, the district found that physical libraries simply couldn’t keep pace with the required breadth of levels and titles.
By adopting a digital library solution, they provided immediate access to multilingual ebooks and audiobooks. English learners could start reading rich stories in their native languages to maintain cognitive engagement, gradually transitioning to English text at their own pace. Teachers could design assignments that honored students’ identities, turning the library into a trusted resource for inclusion.
This equity dimension is mirrored in broader sociological data. A landmark March 2026 report by the National Literacy Trust in the UK, which synthesized two decades of reading trends, uncovered a striking phenomenon: while children from lower-income backgrounds (eligible for free school meals) were statistically less likely than their peers to read fiction in print, they were actually more likely to read fiction on screens. Digital formats help flip the script by lowering economic and structural barriers to access and offering an inclusive gateway into literacy for underserved communities.
Coexistence, Not Substitution
The National Literacy Trust’s longitudinal data also reminds us of an important truth: print still matters. It remains the dominant and preferred format for long-form, sustained leisure reading for many children, and it provides an invaluable mental break from a hyper-connected world.
But the narrative that digital devices are displacing reading as a whole is incorrect. And we certainly don’t need a civil war between print and digital; we need to do everything we can to help sustain the habit of reading at all in an increasingly fragmented digital media landscape. With text-based online spaces currently losing ground to highly algorithmic, short-form video and visual media, the act of engaging with large sections of text—in any format—is what we must protect.
For highly engaged students, digital reading beautifully complements their physical bookshelves. For reluctant readers, lower-income students, and multilingual learners, digital reading is often the very bridge that makes literacy accessible in the first place.
As educators, our mandate is clear. We must move past the binary debate of “screens versus paper” and instead demand better, more intentional technology. When we equip our schools with purpose-built literacy tools that prioritize privacy, accessibility, and student choice, we create a wider, more inclusive doorway to a lifetime of reading.