Madrid
Updated:
Keep
The Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, celebrated that the percentage of readers continues to grow and that more and more people say they read for pleasure, and not out of obligation. The barometer of reading habits and purchase of books, prepared by the Federation of Publishers Guilds of Spain (FGEE), in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, indicates that 67.9 percent of Spaniards who responded to the pollsters read books at least once a quarter, and from of these, 64.4 percent did so for leisure, in their free time. 52.7 percent, with a weekly frequency. The figures for 2021 are similar to those of the previous year, when there was a notable increase due to the pandemic.
“This report –said Iceta– is an X-ray of the reading health of the country, and of health in general. We are convinced that the societies that read the most are the most stable and the richest”.
The barometer, in the category of books, also includes the audiobooks, whose consumption has gone from 3.1 percent in 2020 to 5.2 percent last year. Reading, according to the Government, is also listening to a book. The evolution in the last ten years among occasional book readers (at least once a quarter) is estimated at a growth of 6.5 points, from 57.9 percent in 2011. There remains, on the other hand, a very worrying percentage of people who never read, according to Culture: 35.6 percent of respondents who admit they have no interest in books due to lack of time (49.8 percent), lack of interest (25.1 percent) or because they prefer to spend their free time doing other things (24.9 percent), such as walking, sleeping, watching television, use social networks, meet friends or play sports. “It seems easier to get those who read to read more than to convince those who don’t read to do so,” Iceta said. “This has a lot to do with the economic and educational level of people: the higher the level, the more reading.”
Screens and teenagers
Indeed, the barometer shows that reading books for leisure is higher among those with university studies (82.1 percent) than among those with primary studies (37.2 percent). The percentage of women readers (69.6 percent) is significantly higher than that of men (41 percent), except in the age group over 65, where the rate is equal. By autonomous communities, Madrid, the Basque Country, Navarra, Catalonia, La Rioja and Aragón have a ratio of readers above the average. In the classification by age, there continues to be a sharp decline in the proportion of readers over 15 years of age. “The ‘smartphones’ enter the lives of adolescents earlier… I don’t know if it’s the screens or the hormones,” said Daniel Fernández, president of the FGEE.
How many people who claim to read really do? The results offered to the press do not refer to corrections of possible lies in the responses of the respondents. In total, if the number of readers of the press, comics, websites or social networks is taken into account, almost all Spaniards (95.4 percent) read.