Disclaimer: I sometimes read up to three heavy books a week.
I don't know how you'd begin to compare. What assumptions do you use regarding the lifecycle of the paper? Is the paper to be read once and then discarded? Is it recycled? Is it read over and over again? So rather than answer the question I want to explain why it is unanswerable by looking at a few issues.
Consider reference books, for example, and to go one step further consider micro-print reference books (like the "Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary") which are intended to be read with a magnifying glass. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is a large two-volume set, but each page is a micro-print reproduction of four pages of the standard edition. if the book gets a significant amount of use, possibly over decades, it would be very hard to imagine a screen doing better. This is one reason I am somewhat concerned about so much academic literature going into electronic form.
Reading could range from there to colorful junk mail, resource-intensive to produce, read once and discarded by a small percentage of recipients....
I just can't imagine that there is a single answer here even if we limit it to books. Nonetheless, here are some back of the hand calculations for reading a 1/2 lb book once and recycling it.
If we start with US government figures and work back we get slightly under 1kWH per lb of paper in the recycling process. Keep in mind printing still has to be taken into account and that isn't cheap either. If we are comparing to a kindle, I couldn't find specific power figures (except that it charges at 5 w), that would mean you'd have to read for about 100 hours to make up for it.
But the catch is as always, how much use does a book get? If you read the Odyssey once every few years, you may quite easily get that 100 hours out of the book. My 10lb (or maybe heavier) Compact Edition of the OED gets way more than 10k hours of usage over its life, let me tell you.
So the argument is likely to be an argument against disposable books rather than against printed books generally.