5 ms·
No Spanish reading crisis?
- jruohonen 3mo agoRef.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830868
- jimmydoe 3mo agoAI effect is delayed in less rich population.
- Anduia 3mo agoI 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?
- piva00 3mo agoSpain 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.
- cesarvarela 3mo agoSaying Spain is rich while half the population lives on 1,000 euros per month (mil euristas) is crazy or just very "technically accurate".
- elnatro 3mo agoIt is less than the half, and there is a big unregulated economy in those regions.
- red-iron-pine 3mo agoboy howdy let me tell you about how little the USA-ians often live on, or how low the pay is in Japan
- elnatro 3mo agoAre you one of those Americans that think that Spain is in Latin-America?
- outime 3mo ago>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.
- christkv 3mo agoYeah 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)
- some_random 3mo agoEvery 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.
- actionfromafar 3mo agoReading a book is also a decent proxy for being able to hold your attention for more than 5 seconds.
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoIf 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
- world2vec 3mo agoIMHO screens and audio don't count as reading books.
- KaiserPro 3mo agoCould 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
- world2vec 3mo agoI 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.
- malloryerik 3mo agoI 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.
- KaiserPro 3mo ago
- erelong 3mo agoI 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.)
- amanaplanacanal 3mo agoI've seen many of these types of articles, and usually they are taking about long form reading, meaning books.
- brainwad 3mo agoWhat'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?
- harperlee 3mo agoI'm sure the general population being asked whether they read books have a very clear idea of what a book is.
- brainwad 3mo agoIs 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?
- toolslive 3mo ago> Democracy is safe in Spain! iirc, The Prince from Machiavelli is required reading during secondary education. That will surely awaken their political awareness.
- mrexroad 3mo agoRe-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.
- otherme123 3mo ago> 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?
- Muromec 3mo agoWhy would it not? Divine Comedy and Jack London were both required reading in my Ukrainian school (in translation of course). So was tolstoevsky unfortunately.
- Mainan_Tagonist 3mo agoWhy unfortunately? Tolstoy and Dostoevky are generally recognized as great authors. Being Russian does not make them retrospectively Putinist, does it?
- lmc 3mo agoWell, War and Peace is 1200 pages... fuck that at age 15 or whatever XD
- Muromec 3mo agoIt'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.
- brador 3mo agoSelf declared? worthless. Get me the kindle sale stats.
- watwut 3mo agoThe assumption being that all reading must be done on kindle?
- lbrito 3mo agoFrom the same creators of "no one writes code by hand anymore".
- elnatro 3mo ago> 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-mercado-del-libro-en-el-ano-2025/ https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...
- schnitzelstoat 3mo agoIt'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.
- ghusto 3mo ago> 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.
- broken-kebab 3mo agoYou 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.
- jermaustin1 3mo ago> 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.
- carljungslabtek 3mo ago
- d0gmatism 3mo agoThe 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
- elnatro 3mo agoWhat 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-mercado-del-libro-en-el-ano-2025/ https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-... https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20260611/ventas-libros-siguen-alza-2025/17110462.shtml https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20260611/ventas-libros-siguen-a...
- codeadict 3mo agoAs 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
- yorwba 3mo agoThe 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.
- pessimizer 3mo agoMy 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.
- rahimnathwani 3mo agoLike DAU vs MAU
- cherrylemonsoda 3mo agoSpanish is one of the smallest languages in the world at ~93k words. Most languages have hundreds of thousands, English has over a million. Spanish is also nearly phonetic. It's very simple, there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages. Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.
- vondur 3mo agoYes, but I have an outrageous American English accent which ruins my attempt to speak it!
- ctoa 3mo agoThe only thing you're right about here is that Spanish is "nearly phonetic" by which you mean that the writing system is orthographically transparent and very standardized. That's true and a huge benefit for learners. The rest is not right, the word counts in particular is just a reflection of why counting words in a language is hard: 93k comes from the number headwords listed in the core RAE dictionary. The RAE's dictionary of Americanism adds another 70k entries. When you include historical and technical terminology, more comprehensive dictionaries will have well over 300k words. Counting "over a million" from English comes from way, way more inclusive counting methods that throw in technical jargon, acronyms, global slang, etc. The OED, which would compare to the RAE dictionary numbers, lists only 171k words. Beyond this, counting is complicated by the fact that compounding and morphological changes work differently, English will use different words in cases where Spanish would use suffixes, and will count compounds as words that in Spanish would be phrases. "there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English, grammar and morphology more nuanced, they do things in different ways but this is a deep misunderstanding.
- limecherrysoda 3mo agoUsing your figures: 93k (Spanish) to 171k English or 300k+ (Spanish) to 1M+ English the original point still stands. > "there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English I remain unconvinced here. Spanish love song lyrics have no choice but to invoke "corazon" and "amor" so often because there are so few other words that convey that precise emotion. There are other ways (thinking of the song "Amor de Loca Juventud" by Buena Vista Social Club - beautiful song), but not many other ways like there are in say French, Swedish, or English, to use a few examples. This is mathematically proven to be true by word count alone - which you admit is a far lower figure in Spanish vs other languages. It doesn't diminish anything about the Spanish language to point this out either, if anything, it makes it more quaint.
- clint 3mo agoPeople 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).
- arjie 3mo agoInter-country statistics almost entirely rely on definitional disparity. Border towns are good sources of comparison.
- tedggh 3mo agoHow much of the decline in the US could be attributed to Fountas & Pinnell?
- Glandalf 3mo agoThe 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.
- dzonga 3mo agoAnglophone 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.