Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right.

Frank Schembari loves books — printed books. He loves how they smell. He loves scribbling in the margins, underlining interesting sentences, folding a page corner to mark his place.

Schembari is not a retiree who sips tea at Politics and Prose or some other bookstore. He is 20, a junior at American University, and paging through a thick history of Israel between classes, he is evidence of a peculiar irony of the Internet age: Digital natives prefer reading in print.

“I like the feeling of it,” Schembari said, reading under natural light in a campus atrium, his smartphone next to him. “I like holding it. It’s not going off. It’s not making sounds.”

Textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning, a bias that surprises reading experts given the same group’s proclivity to consume most other content digitally. A University of Washington pilot study of digital textbooks found that a quarter of students still bought print versions of e-textbooks that they were given for free. Keep reading

Does this mean that there may be hope for hymnals? I appreciate the advantages of multimedia projects and screens but they do not convey the message that the congregation is expected to sing. Rarely do slides show the melody line as well as the lyrics. They neither presume nor encourage even a degree of musical literacy. Hand someone a hymnal, on the other hand, and the message to that person is "you are expected to sing." Congregants can purchase their own hymnal, sing their favorite hymns and worship songs at home, read the words as poetry, and use the words as prayer.