Leveraging trends in digital reading to boost student engagement

Perlego, the leading provider of e-textbooks, shares insights into how today’s students read and engage with online course materials.

In the rapidly evolving world of higher education, institutions face mounting challenges that go beyond academic performance — ranging from affordability, to providing accessible course materials, and navigating artificial intelligence. All have a significant impact upon student success, and our latest blog post will explore these barriers, and how to mitigate them.  

Reimagining Student Engagement with Course Materials in a Digital Age

Matt East, Director of B2B at Perlego, addressed these pressing student success concerns at the AnnotatED 2025 conference. East explained, “We're all observing within US colleges and higher education, and globally, that affordability is a problem. I don't think that any of us will have spoken to a student or been on campus physically or remotely, and not heard about the challenges that students are having accessing course materials as the costs continue to spiral.”

Research from the National Center for Education Data Statistics revealed that 20% of students who failed college cite the reason as the cost of textbooks and not being able to access them. Perlego’s founders were driven to launch the platform after encountering expensive course materials, inspiring their mission to make education accessible to all with a ‘Spotify for textbooks’ subscription model.

Scaffolding Digital Reading and the Power of Collaborative Learning

Beyond the affordability crisis, another significant challenge in higher education is the lack of structured support for academic reading skills. While institutions may offer resources to help students develop critical literacies and information skills, these supports can be poorly signposted and hidden deep within learning platforms, with students not being guided towards tools that could improve their academic performance. 

The transformative power of collaboration in digital reading is key — this practice doesn’t just enhance comprehension, but fosters community and deeper engagement with course content. Strategies like “jigsaw reading” and peer-based interpretation can elevate the student learning experience. Jigsaw reading, for example, involves students tackling different parts of a text individually and then coming together to synthesize their understanding. This shared effort not only deepens comprehension but exposes students to diverse perspectives from their peers.

Removing Barriers to Reading: Students Lack Access, not Interest

Data from Perlego’s platform demonstrates how in institutions with large-scale adoption, most reading actually happens outside the prescribed syllabus. In two recent flagship partnerships, 88% of reading hours were outside the reading list. This trend challenges the long-standing narrative that students are reluctant readers. Instead, it suggests that lack of access — not lack of interest — is the real issue.

Factors like the inaccessibility of physical libraries, lingering post-COVID disruptions, and competing life priorities (commuting, finances, welfare) all emerge as primary barriers. When those barriers are lifted, students not only read more, they read widely, with curiosity and autonomy. There is a clear need to reframe how institutions view engagement with academic reading and the tools they provide to support it.

Using AI Responsibly: Promoting Discoverability Over Dependency

Ongoing, complex conversations are happening across higher education around the rise of artificial intelligence and its implications in the classroom. Challenges range from AI literacy, to untrustworthy sources and questions around academic practice such as plagiarism. 

Perlego has developed AI principles alongside HE and publisher partners to guide its approach: rather than replace learning, their tools are designed to support it. The platform’s AI-powered tools, Smart Search and Research Assistant, enable students to surface the most relevant extracts from over 1 million high quality academic sources.

Data shows that by adapting to learners’ changing expectations in an AI-driven world, reading engagement rises. Matt East commented, “those students who engaged with AI Researcher actually ended up reading three times more books than students who didn't. Students aren't just engaging with reading in the traditional formats, so we're now leveraging different modalities and different forms of content augmentation to help them.”

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Overall, as the landscape of higher education evolves, so too must the tools and strategies we use to support student learning. From addressing barriers to accessing core texts and encouraging deeper collaborative reading, to integrating responsible AI tools that promote discovery over dependency, the impact is clear: students thrive when learning is made flexible, empowering  and inclusive. Perlego’s approach — centering on principles like support over substitution — offers an example of how harnessing trends in digital reading can increase student engagement and success in challenging times. 

Get in touch to discover how Perlego can increase student engagement at your institution: