Children readers, apathetic adolescents Lalectura in Spain
64.7% of Spaniards read at least one book during 2021, and 52.7% did so weekly.
Is that a lot or is that little?
It is
a lot compared to the reading history of the Spaniards themselves
.
In 2012, that same statistic, collected last week in the Reading Barometer of the Federation of Publishers Guilds, said that the basic percentage of readers was 59.1%,
5.6 points less than today
.
And that, during the last decade, tablets, Instagram,
streaming
television and film platforms and the economic-health crisis of spring 2020 have arrived or established themselves in our lives
... Distractions and setbacks that, in principle, They sabotage reading
.
It's a lot, too, if we compare the figure with reading rates in Portugal (
around 40% of readers, according to a study by the Gulbenkian Foundation
).
But it is little if we look in France.
Despite the fact that the trend in reading has been downward in the last year, 81% of those surveyed declared themselves readers in the latest survey by the
Center National du Livre
, carried out in 2021. It is important to insist on the trend in low: in 2019, 88% of French people were readers.
The hypothesis of the Center National du Livre is that
the anxiety caused by the pandemic caused thousands of French people to lose the concentration necessary
to sit down in front of a book.
Are these two figures comparable?
64.7% of Spaniards, 40% of the Portuguese and 81% of the French?
Not literally, because the methodologies changed (until 2011, Spain used another survey system that gave higher reading percentages), but as a reference.
Starting next year,
the European Union will impose common measurement criteria
that employees in Spain follow.
"What most determines reading rates is education," explains Óscar Chicharro, director of the latest reading barometer.
«In all the categories that we do in the surveys, in the end, education will be behind.
In the autonomous communities with the best reading rates, there is a larger population with higher education
.
In the age groups with more readers, in income levels, in any variable that we work on, we will find the same reason behind it».
Chicharro's theory is that the slow but steady progress in reading rates reflects the better education of Spaniards.
"If we had data from 1985, the data would be much lower," he says.
So
the idealized image of the pre-digital past in which subway cars were full of people reading novels
is not quite real.
But that correlation would also explain the delay with respect to France.
39.7% of Spaniards have university studies according to a 2021 survey. In France, the percentage of graduates, graduates or something else is 46%.
There is another statistic that separates France from Spain and that explains our bookseller delay:
the GDP per capita in 2020 of France is 36,520 euros and that of Spain, 25,419.
In other words, 70% of the wealth of our neighbors.
"I would look at another factor: when we address surveys to readers who never read and ask them why,
49.8% answer us that it is because they are tired, because they don't have time
," explains Chicharro.
“We often talk about the fact that we Spaniards have an improvable work culture, that we spend more time at work to produce the same thing than in other European countries.
I think that is a problem that takes us away from reading.
«The work that has been done with reading in Spain in these years is good.
There has been a lot of insistence in schools, the network of public libraries is very active and there has been a change in criteria that seems positive to me:
we are no longer obsessed with children reading great books;
what matters to us is that they read books
», continues Chicharro.
“The editorial offer has also been attentive.
The proof is that a few years ago there was talk that children stopped reading when they entered adolescence.
Today, the statistics tell us that this does not happen, that the group of 19 to 25 years old has the best reading rates.
Chicharro's prediction is that the reading rate in Spain
will continue to grow in the coming years
.
The economic crisis of 2020 left the book sector strong, its turnover levels resisted and today they are close to the sales prior to the crash of 2008. The book not only resists but also grows little by little.
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