Survey finds 30 per cent of online population read books frequently
A 17-COUNTRY report just released by global market-analysis company GfK says 30 per cent of the international online population read books “every day or most days”.
This is led by China at 36 per cent, closely followed by Spain and the United Kingdom at 32 per cent each.
However, if the segment is widened to include both daily readers and those who read “at least once a week”, the international total rises to 59 per cent, with China firmly in the lead (70 per cent of its population), followed by Russia (59 per cent) and Spain (57 per cent).
More than a third (35 per cent) of people in high-income households say they read books every day or most days, compared with a quarter (24 per cent) of those in low-income households. Added to this, one-tenth of people in low-income households claim that they never read books, triple the percentage reported in high-income households (3 per cent).
Overall, 32 per cent of women report reading books every day or most days, compared with 27 per cent of men. This gender gap among the daily book readers is widest in the Netherlands (30 per cent of women versus 14 per cent of men) and Spain (40 per cent of women versus 25 per cent of men), followed by Canada (36 per cent of women versus 23 per cent of men) and Germany (31 per cent of women versus 19 per cent of men).
The Netherlands and South Korea have the highest percentage of their online population who report never reading books, standing at 16 per cent each. In South Korea, this is fairly evenly divided between men and women, but in the Netherlands it is heavily led by men, with 23 per cent never reading books, compared with just 9 per cent of women.
The countries with the next-highest proportion of those who never read books are Belgium (14 per cent), and Canada, France and Japan (all 11 per cent).
Mathias Giloth of GfK Entertainment said the value of these findings for the book industry lay in combining these self-reported data with analysis of actual sales across different markets and insights from the firm’s retail and consumer panels.
“With this multi-layered approach, we help our clients to fine-tune their audience segmentation and identify customer potential, both globally and at [the] country-specific level,” he said.
