No Spanish reading crisis? | Hacker News Reader

No Spanish reading crisis?

commonreader.co.uk

91 pointsjruohonen135 comments

It's not uncommon to see people (and young people) reading on public transport here in Spain. The odd thing is how popular actual paper books are vs. e-readers. Since I got my Kindle in 2015 I haven't read a paper book since.

That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.

And if we look at stuff like the PISA scores, it doesn't seem like this supposed higher rate of reading is paying many dividends.

> That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc.

It's not all that odd to me. The barrier of entry to getting something printed and published is much, much, higher than putting something online, which effects the quality quite a bit.

Obviously there are complete wastes of paper out there in terms of published books, but as a generalisation it's not odd to presume a printed book is going to be of higher quality than a webpage.

You are describing monetization quality, not content quality.

Printing has its moat, yes, which better protects it from copying, and process of consuming from interruptions, and creates payment in advance situation. Printing houses produce enormous amounts of cliche-by-cliche semi-porn "romantic novels", and various sensationalist garbage, and earn money without suffocating dependency on Google, FB and such. Good for them.

> many books are pretty low quality.

Even low-quality books have words people might not know. I often find people who don't read books (physical or eBook) have a much lower vocabulary, and they typically don't value vocabulary, which as an avid reader, I find weird, but I guess to each their own.

Yeah sadly let’s not kid ourselves, most people on their phone on the subway (in the USA) are watching very low quality short form video content. Or they’re reading gossip subreddits or something. If you want to really scare yourself go check out what teachers have to say about the current crop of students and their literacy rates.

We should 100% ban all smart devices for people under 18. Not just in schools but entirely. Middle schoolers literally can’t spell their own names, or words like “want” and “cat”. I would have assumed some of the teachers were pearl-clutching but it’s not just a few of them saying this, it’s all of them, including my own mom who I trust a lot.

>That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.

That's a weird take. The internet has basically no barriers. Book publishing, with all of its many flaws, does. Anyone can technically self publish a book, but the odds that you'll find someone on the subway reading it are small. So odds are the book you see people reading on transit is on average better than an internet content.

No, the vast majority of published books are (and have always been) an insult to trees.

Most places where people do their weekly groceries in Spain have at least a small book section if not a bookstore by the entrance. It's a typical thing to bring over to the beach or a weekend trip that doesn't matter if it gets damaged or lost.

Myself I have an e-ink reader but almost always take a paper book on the subway. It's still better quality print, not fragile in any way that matters, and I don't have to think about charge or aging electronics. I only bring the e-reader for manuals and such that change too often to be worth the paper cost, but still miss the old coding manuals with their ad-hoc page sizes, the spatial sense of where the information was in a book was part of the memory anchoring.

I´ve ended up switching back to paper for half of my reading. Kids prefer paper for reading to. Kindle goes with me on vacation when I don´t want to drag around 2-3 kilos of paper (Reading chunky history books at the moment).

I wonder if this is the reason Spain resisted the advent of far right for so long, compared to its European counterparts.

The Spanish Civil War would like to have a word with you, but maybe Franco is part of "the resistance" now.

Franco died in 1975. They clearly mean recently.

He might have died 50 years ago, but sadly his shadow is very, very long even to this day...

Not really. If you compare Spanish politics with UK, for example.

What an odd comment. I'd think it's obvious I referred to the current wave that started 15* years ago.

* give or take some years

Isn't it obvious that nothing is obvious?

Obviously not.

> That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.

You've received several answers on the "quality" side due to books being harder to create, but I'll cover two more arguments:

1. Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore, especially not on their phones. They're mindlessly scrolling short-form video, either muted or blasting them really loud with no headphones, if my experience of Spanish subway is accurate.

2. Even if all books were just printed directly from random internet pages, and there was zero difference in quality, it would be a huge step-up to go from reading one internet page at a time, to focusing on the same content for 200+ pages in a row. There is huge value in giving ourselves the longer attention span.

>Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore

Even as hyperbole it's too extreme.

Really? I find phone book reading to be a very primitive experience without researching SOTA book apps. Is there an app that turns ebooks into a single infinite scroll longform article with intuitive bookmarking and easy book purchase/discovery?

This plus a text-to-speech/audiobook feature with autoscrolling would probably do a lot for book consumption (I mean I, for one, would sign up for that waitlist)

We have all these features and more. In private beta now, sign up for the waiting list at: https://noveltree.ca

Okay, but listening to a book is not the same as reading a book.

Oh, to clarify I was not putting forward the idea of "the audiobook", but rather, having the book read to you as you're reading it (with your own eyes), just because I've heard multiple people mention how it helps them keep their focus on the page.

It's just an experiment in additional stimulation basically.

I guess I'm nobody then. I almost only read the internet.

You and I both, but come on. Do we really want to compare HN readership numbers to TikTok's viewership?

Walk around in the subway someday and count, out of 100 people, how many are reading on their phone vs scrolling. I have not seen a person read an article or book on their phone in ages.

Yes they exist but even Google is making it harder to find content to read by burying text-based pages below AI summaries and video results.

Even so, you should be aware that you're outside the norm. Hell, it's a thing that HN complains all the damn time about. To not notice is to be intentionally ignorant. "Why make a video when you can scan an article quickly", "Why is everything on walled garden video platforms", "Everyone is just watching tiktok and instagram reels."

> That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.

I don't think it's really about the quality, I think the difference is that with a book there's no easy next tab to switch to when a sentence or passage gets too long and loses your interest. Even if a book is poorly written, it will still require you to either fully focus for the duration - or put it down. There's no convenient "leave the tab open in the background and switch to something else for 30 seconds" for books like there is with the internet.

The original article is comparing "a 2023 study showing that only 16% of Americans read for pleasure in a given day, down from the (already low) number of 28% in 2004" with "the percentage of the overall Spanish population that reads for pleasure has increased every year since 2017, reaching 66% in 2025".

I think a big part of the discrepancy probably comes from the different time frames. If you ask somebody who reads for pleasure once a week whether they did so on a given day, they'll say yes 14% of the time, but if you ask them whether they read for pleasure in general, they'll say yes 100%, after all they do it every week!

It would be nice if reading researchers could agree on a standard set of survey questions for the purpose of easy comparison.

My problem with this stuff is that somebody who spent three hours on wikipedia reading about the War of the Triple Alliance is usually counted as somebody who didn't read for pleasure that day.

Like DAU vs MAU

I think from seeing articles like this a few times, that there's a lack of definition from people as what counts as "real reading" and about what materials "count as real reading"

(since I think probably people are reading these days more than ever - it just may be on forums like HN, social media, and AI output, etc.)

so if you just define that specifically then we could just promote it on social media, people reading these specific things, and then "boom" more people are "really reading"

(I presume people want to see more people reading "Great Books of Classic Literature" which is probably a great goal, things like Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" or Dante's "The Divine Comedy", etc.)

I've seen many of these types of articles, and usually they are taking about long form reading, meaning books.

What's a book, though? I suppose people would at least count a traditional e-book. Does long-form fanfic count? How about a book-length website? What about one that was originally published as a book and then republished online?

I'm sure the general population being asked whether they read books have a very clear idea of what a book is.

Is that understanding also cross-culturally consistent? That's a typical failure mode in comparative surveys between different countries - the meaning of the question depends on the translation used in each language. I imagine here the implied frequency might also vary between languages; maybe English speakers don't say they "read" unless they read once a week, while Spanish speakers are laxer?

I think it's obvious enough without getting into the weeds like this unless their sample size is unreasonably small. E-book yes obviously counts. For the rest, like fanfic? Probably, but does it matter here? Is this actually going to move the needle?

Be cool if they would research that, instead of asking rhetorical questions and assuming that none of it matters and everything is "obvious."

I think it's just people being snooty. Bestsellers are trash, and by definition a plurality of readers are reading them. I don't think someone who reads Gladwell has any greater cognitive power than somebody who reads twitter.

All your examples could be printed and read as books - whatever form they are consumed in. What differences are you seeking to highlight with these examples?

People don't usually count reading an online piece of writing as equivalent to reading a book, even if the exact same content could also be in book form. Hence if you ask speakers of a language with a lot of available online reading material (English), you may systematically underestimate how much they read long-form content.

I think most people would consider it something published alright, as other definitions start to become a bit absurd (e.g. reading the menu at a restaurant or the match day programme probably aren't what people consider as 'reading for pleasure').

Outside of that, I don't think we should gatekeep it too much though - the biggest benefits come from reading anything at all.

The study focuses on books (and comics, but that only bumped it up by a couple of percent).

Inter-country statistics almost entirely rely on definitional disparity. Border towns are good sources of comparison.

> Democracy is safe in Spain!

iirc, The Prince from Machiavelli is required reading during secondary education. That will surely awaken their political awareness.

Re-reading it atm, for first time in ~25years, and I’m struck with how much of historical context my kids don’t have that I’d want them to before recommending it to them. I feel I had more of that context when I first read it, but maybe I’m rose tinting my initial reading.

> The Prince from Machiavelli is required

In Spain? Never heard of that, and would not make sense. An italian author writting about politics in Florence?

Why would it not? Divine Comedy and Jack London were both required reading in my Ukrainian school (in translation of course). So was tolstoevsky unfortunately.

Why unfortunately? Tolstoy and Dostoevky are generally recognized as great authors. Being Russian does not make them retrospectively Putinist, does it?

Well, War and Peace is 1200 pages... fuck that at age 15 or whatever XD

It's 1200 pages of bad writing where he can't get to the fucking point and sentences are page-long subclause mess. He is only on the list because commies put him there for ideological alignment and being long form. Seriously, fuck tolstoy.

>Being Russian does not make them retrospectively Putinist, does it?

Because Chekhov, Gogol, Ilf and Petrov, and Strugatsky brothers are better. And dostoevsky definitely is in the retroactively putinist camp, if you don't catch that you haven't been reading enough of him. For mental hygiene alone he should be off that list. Even Bulgakov is better, although not for modern sensibilities. And is a huge waste of time.

That being said, some authors which are definitely great, just shouldn't be on the mandatory reading list for 15 year olds for all kinds of reasons, including for the reason of being russian. The list is not infinite and there is an opportunity cost that is wasted on those two specifically.

Because we have a lot of authors from what we call "golden years", and "Spanish Literature" teachers tend to be extra proud of them. Why would they recommend Dante, when they have "Cantar del Mío Cid"? A Shakespeare translation or original Cervantes? Mark Twain or Benito Pérez Galdós?

I don't mean that non spanish authors are worse (I dislike many of them because they were forced to me too early, when I preferred Dahl or Tolkien), I am just saying that it makes no sense to recommend Shakespeare instead of Cervantes in Spanish Literature class, where they recommend/require books. I can't imagine Russian Literature teachers requiring "Episodios Nacionales" authored by Galdós, a book about spanish history/politics in the XIX century over any russian author about any russian theme.

As a Spaniard I wish we had Mark Twain instead of the drowsy village dramas from the so-called Golden Age.

Yean, sure, sometimes it is like they train us to dislike those authors. But as a spaniard, had you ever heard of someone who was recommended/required to read Maquiavelo? Maybe some weird philosophy teacher? Even more, do you know a lot of people that knows even the name of the book "El Príncipe", and not just "Maquiavelo: el fin justifica los medios", and that's it?

Uhm, maybe pre-Uni students (Bachillerato) choosing the Humanities branch instead of the STEM one.

I have some Spanish ex-co-workers. I just verified it. They both had it on their required reading list in high-school. (one of them is in his 30s, the other in his 40s)

As a born, raised and currently living in Spain, I had never heard that. We have plenty of classical author required in high school: Cervantes, Quevedo, Benavente, Bécquer, Machado, Lorca, Pérez Galdós... Most modern and cool teachers also recommend contemporary authors like Ana María Matute, García Marquez or Jordi Sierra i Fabra. The foreign author most recommended has to be Roah Dahl, Michael Ende, Jules Verne or Exupéry.

I never heard of anybody who has read Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Dante or any other "advanced" foreign author in high school.

There are some links with some "obligatory readings" for high school: https://www.edu.xunta.gal/centros/ieslamascastelo/system/fil..., https://www.educa2.madrid.org/web/lengua-castellana-y-litera... http://iesparquegoya.es/files/lengua/Libros%20de%20Lectura%2... or https://iesalgarb.es/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2023/07/1.-... (first links when I search "lecturas recomendadas ESO") where you will find exactly one non-spanish writting author: Ray Bradbury's 451. A spicy teacher, for sure.

Maybe your coworkers read The Prince, but that is not a general recommendation or even something you heard from time to time.

These guys are from Galicia. Maybe that makes a difference.

One of those links, the first, is from a Galicia school. Incidentaly, I am Galician, and I read "O príncipe, de Maquiavelo" when I was around 40.

The difference in Galicia is that we also have "Literatura Galega", that requires us to read Castelao, Neira Vilas, Rosalía, Murguía, Otero Pedraio... I bet other Comunidades with their own language also recommend local writters.

Unless they went to some kind of private school, where they found a weird literature proffesor with political inclinations (the kind that also recommend Gramsci or Rothbard like it is "literature"), or maybe the requirement was from a philosophy or a history class, I never heard such a thing. Not saying that they are lying, but it is not a common recommendation, even less a requirement.

41 years old Spanish guy here, Machiavelli was definitely NOT in our required reading list, at least not back in my day.

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. I am Spanish and I don't know of anybody who was required to read Machiavelli in high school.

It was required when I was a student in American schools. I don't think it really had much to do with democracy, though. I suppose there are lessons that you could generalize to any state, like "don't hire mercenaries," but I wouldn't say that it gave lessons especially relevant to either Athenian style democracy or to the mixed constitutions called "democracies" from the late eighteenth century to the present.

People tend to use the terms "Reading" and "Literate" to be interchangable but they really aren't. I'm sure there are plenty of kids (and adults) who "literally" can't read words and rely heavily on TTS and perhaps STT to interact with the world via their devices.

However the larger and probably more dire issue is of literacy which means you're not only able to read the words but fully understand them and make connections between ideas and be able to communicate what you read to other people. That's the idea that really matters because it unlocks an entire universe of additional learning and a deeper understanding of the world.

The lack of actual literacy is, in my opinion, why America is in such a pickle because there are probably generations of people at this point who fundamentally do not understand what is going on around them (and certainly don't understand any half-way complicated topic or situation) and just float around on "vibes" and their emotions (which they likely also do not understand fully).

Ref.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830868

Anglophone countries suffers from social media - with the whole monetization thing driven towards making fake content, rage baiting content that can be consumed in the west & divisive to put people into buckets.

How much of the decline in the US could be attributed to Fountas & Pinnell?

Self declared? worthless.

Get me the kindle sale stats.

The assumption being that all reading must be done on kindle?

From the same creators of "no one writes code by hand anymore".

> Según los datos proporcionados, en el año 2025 la facturación en el mercado del libro superó los 1250 millones de euros, lo que supone un crecimiento del 4% respecto a los datos del año anterior. El número de libros vendidos alcanzó los 76 millones de libros impresos.

From https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...

>Democracy is safe in Spain!

Honestly, this sounds like a shitpost and I'd remove the line if I was the author.

That aside, I really don't understand the glorification of reading. I love reading (also I'm Spanish) and I do it every day, but reading can also just mean reading romance novels and living in a parallel unrealistic world, and that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict.

Yeah that is a reach. Also based in Spain and Im not sure they read as much as they say here with teens at home. I could not find any source information for the numbers anywhere (maybe I missed it)

The source is https://www.cultura.gob.es/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baromet...

Yeah but I can´t find any information about how the study was done? Sample size, etc.

Every entertainment medium has some level of prestige associated with it mostly based on how old it is, which is the primary reason book reading is venerated. As for the democracy comment, I think the logic there smart people read books and smart people support democracy therefore the more people reading books the more democracy support there is. This is obviously nonsense but it's really popular especially among people who venerate book reading in the abstract like this.

Reading a book is also a decent proxy for being able to hold your attention for more than 5 seconds.

Re: the glorification of reading.

I've thought about this. I agree with you not all reading is equal, and reading social posts (including HN) is the equivalent of junk food, but there's something about reading that sets it apart. I think it's like exercising. Reading engages parts of the mind not exercised otherwise, it requires a more active imagination, it often involves "adult" mechanisms like delayed gratification that are less present in other forms of communication. It's more active and less frictionless than many internet activities, watching TV, etc. That's why it's sometimes a struggle to find a moment to read, and why young people often don't do it: it requires more effort than competing activities (this struggle also applies to physical activity, of course!). And this effort does something positive to your brain, I think. I'd say given two forms of trash entertainment, one trashy literature, and the other a trashy TV show, the former is better for you than the latter.

Just in case anyone wants to debate this, I am NOT saying watching TV is completely frictionless or requires no imagination at all, and of course there's a lot of variance in which specific show or movie. I'm only arguing in relative terms.

> that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict

I dunno. There's something to be said for having the focus to sit down and read through a book. It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts and doesn't succumb to constant tech distractions. Which in turn suggests an ability to think more clearly and less emotively about politics.

> It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts and doesn't succumb to constant tech distractions.

Could just as likely suggest they're affluent enough to have time to sit down and read vs listen to an audio book or just skim news in a magazine or on a screen between jobs.

In other news communist propaganda can't get you don't if don't experience or fear poverty and racist takes aren't appealing if you don't suffer from either the same or ed

>It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts

Maybe. There’s been a significant backlash against popular fiction authors for writing in anything but the first person, single fixed POV recently which sort of suggests that readers don’t like having to deal with the interiority of multiple different characters. If they’re not comfortable with the bare minimum of cognitive dissonance are they really doing much thinking, or just letting the text wash over them as someone does while watching a YouTube video?

Apparently not enough focus to sit down and check if the studies were comparable (time and cohort)...

If youre only counting books I haven't read anything for maybe a decade. And I maybe read about a hundred hours in life total before that.

If you include a screen I've read everyday for the past 25+ years

IMHO screens and audio don't count as reading books.

Could you expand on the audiobook part?

Im assuming that screens dont count because its not novels/literature

but audio books are the same content but delivered by a different medium, I am genuinely curious as to your opinion on is not counting

I just think listening to a book is not the same as actually reading it. Just my personal preference, really, and I'm not knocking down on audiobooks.

Listening to audiobooks, IMHO, is a more passive and less focused way of consuming literature.

I must say this truly depends. I can sometimes be more focused with an audiobook. An extreme example? Heidegger's Being and Time, Macquarie and Robinson translation. The audiobook version read by Martyn Swain is a godsend for helping one try to grapple with this monster. Though his only commentary is in timbre, rhythm, speed, it absolutely enriches the reading. The audiobook is something like 24 hours long, but there's just no way you finish in that time (if you ever do finish); if you're like me you've gotta rewind rewind rewind, baby.

A talented reader can work magic. Ukemi and Naxos have great titles.

Thank you for this.

You're not the first person to say this. I have some empathy for this view, even though its the opposite of mine.

For me, audiobooks offer, more space for imagination. More recently its also a more consistent way to get unbroken narrative into my head. However I strongly suspect that is down to how I process information.

I didn't really read properly until I was quite old, however talking radio was quite ubiquitous in my house. There were lots of audiobook-like content. so perhaps its training?

And it’s my understanding that, auditory vs visual processing aside, studies demonstrate that the brain activation is essentially identical between reading a book and listening to it.

Depends on the amount of focus you dedicate to your listening. But unlike reading, it's much easier to use it as background activity.

Also, I'm very much convinced that the brain is distracted away from the content by the voice acting and intonation; same way that most people physically can't concentrate when listening to music with vocals, evolution made us really sensitive to the human voice.

Audiobooks do not feel like disconnecting. It feels like another app on my smart device pumping digital sound into my ears.

Leaving my devices inside and sitting on the porch, reading a book feels much healthier for my brain. And more intentional consumption than passive noise to kill time.

> feels much healthier

Isn't that how tarot cards and all that bollocks works?

> but audio books are the same content but delivered by a different medium, I am genuinely curious as to your opinion on is not counting

Audio books are passive content. It's not reading. Not remotely the same brain process.

Imo, audio books are perfectly comparable to listening to podcasts. Calling it reading is absurd. It is not reading, it is listening.

And reading on screen is reading.

IMO audiobooks and physical books are an identical experience for passive reading, but not for active reading.

So audiobook genre fiction is reading, but audiobook War and Peace or audiobook The C Programming Language doesn't count. Not for arbitrary gate-keeping reasons, but because reading those books implies a more active form of engagement than marching linearly through it.

The article doesn't distinguish reading books from reading anything else. Though it's pretty short and light on details. The article it cites strongly implies the reading is only books.

All that said, [I find] reading books is overrated. They're often outdated, low effort slop, and even more so in this AI era.

How could fiction books become outdated? That is an absolutely alien opinion for me!

-edit- I said "non-fiction" when I meant "fiction". Of course non-fiction books become obsolete quite fast sometimes.

Pretty easily - I don't think reading a medical text from the 19th century will give you up-to-date information. I'd agree that the concept doesn't apply to fiction, though.

I was mostly speaking of nonfiction. Though I find most fiction doesn't age well in any medium. Appreciating it often requires social context I don't really have time to learn. And many fictional works from the past are chock full of racism, sexism, irrational social phobias, etc.

For those who put in the work, there isn't even a cultural bond to enjoy since most of the people who originally consumed those works are themselves dead and buried. (Modern niches and widely studied "classics" notwithstanding.)

> Though I find most fiction doesn't age well in any medium.

What a crazy take!

> Appreciating it often requires social context I don't really have time to learn.

????

> And many fictional works from the past are chock full of racism, sexism, irrational social phobias, etc

I have some news for you. That stuff has lasted for as long as humans have existed, and will continue to exist as long as humans do. It is intrinsic to humans, unfortunately.

> That stuff has lasted for as long as humans have existed, and will continue to exist as long as humans do.

No doubt. Doesn't mean I want to consume more of it via fiction.

> Though I find most fiction doesn't age well in any medium

Shakespeare is so old it's now undecipherable to any English speaker without a cliffnotes explaining it all.... for instance

Nah, if you spend a few minutes understanding one, the rest are easy.

"Reading books is overrated" -- what an HN take. You've gotta be kidding me.

Perhaps you can make some counter points and change my mind?

I disagree.

I read books, but I also read essays, newsletters, blogs, Wikipedia articles, discussions and so on. These also contain important and useful information. It's not a dichotomy between books and slop. Hell, a lot of books should have been blog posts.

Audiobooks are also valid, as are podcasts. Sure, they might not engage you like text does, but they still impart knowledge.

To me, this is like ranting against electric bikes because they're not as difficult. If they get more people to engage in a fun activity, then they serve their purpose.

I don't think anyone's saying audiobooks aren't "valid" or worthwhile.

Just that if someone asks you if you were reading this morning, you should probably say "no" if you were listening to a podcast. It's not a value judgement, just a category.

I personally think that though the medium is different, audiobooks are at least _similar_ to reading a book.

Screens however, are you including something like an eReader as _not_ reading books?

> I personally think that though the medium is different, audiobooks are at least _similar_ to reading a book.

Very different brain processes. They're the same in that they are both forms of entertainment based on a written story, I guess.

I think screens, in this context, means stuff like reading blog posts and whatnot on your phone or laptop.

Screens don't count?

AI effect is delayed in less rich population.

I don't think "less rich population" is an accurate description of Spain. It's a high-income developed country. Perhaps you assumed the article was about Spanish speakers worldwide rather than Spain specifically?

Spain is as rich as Japan on GDP PPP, richer than Israel and New Zealand.

Readership issues in countries like the USA started way before mass adoption of AI, so also it's not related to AI effects.

Saying Spain is rich while half the population lives on 1,000 euros per month (mil euristas) is crazy or just very "technically accurate".

It is less than the half, and there is a big unregulated economy in those regions.

boy howdy let me tell you about how little the USA-ians often live on, or how low the pay is in Japan

Are you one of those Americans that think that Spain is in Latin-America?

The reading crisis is overblown, women dominate publishing and much of the output is geared toward female readers. Smut and photo-filled recipe books, Wiccan tween fiction. Men are happy reading classics and technical books.

Take this incel garbage back to 4chan.

Ruin 4chan and the whole internet becomes 4chan, you know this to be true.

The statistic is total garbage

nobody reads books in spain

and democracy doesn't have anything to do with that

and democracy is not desirable per se

but of course it wouldn't need to be stated if the writer wasn't a dogmatic idy0t

What data do you have to support your statement? Because Im the read world A lot of books are published and sold in Spain.

https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...

https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20260611/ventas-libros-siguen-a...

As somebody that spends a lot of time in Spain I can confirm people read a lot compared to the US in general. Seeing a bunch of teenagers in a park reading books is very common and even in rural town where I stay elder people are well read

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