Last week I wrote about how digital-direct-marketers are using print to drive more and better sales results.  I have asserted for some time in my Hybrid Media sales training that consumers use print for different reasons than they do digital media, and that the two together are more powerful than the sum of the parts.

But many readers sill wonder about the importance of print in the future because, they say, “younger people don’t like print.”

So the findings by Harris Interactive, in their March 2014 survey reported by eMarketer, that only 20% of Millennials read more ebooks than they do print books, is a refreshing reminder of the lasting value and valued “form-factor” in print.

There is wide disagreement on just how important ebook reading is…as a percentage of reading.  While the Harris Interactive poll found that 52% of their respondents said they had read an ebook, a study published in January 2014 by Pew Research Center’s Internet Research Project found that out of the 76% of respondents who had read a book in the past year, just 28% (or 23% of the whole sample) had read an ebook.

As reported in eMarketer, Pew’s study found that those who did use ebooks were using the devices to supplement, not replace, printed books.

When it comes to how to sell print advertising, one key is to banish the myths and work with the facts. Print is not dying, but changing its role in the world.  Since print was in a bubble in the past, it’s no wonder that some print properties will shrink or die.  But just like the housing bubble didn’t make us decide that no one would live in a house in the future, the decline in print circulation doesn’t mean it will go to zero, nor will it be unimportant to a whole segment of the population.