Do we read too few books?

When things go somewhat awry in Türkiye on certain issues and in certain circles, one of the things we often do is to compare ourselves with others and lament over ourselves.

A significant part of this literature of lament, or grumbling, concerns our level of reading. We are a nation that does not read books. Look at the Japanese, at the English. On the metros you will see very few people without a book in hand. People read even in bank queues. As for us, are we like that? If we saw a book, at best we would take it for a wedge, and they say we use it as an object.

In fact, the impression I get when I go to the book fairs, in Ankara and Istanbul, where I am a constant regular, and lately, frequently, in nearly all the cities of Anatolia, is exactly the opposite. Because we are in the world of books, I do not fail to wonder each time whether we have built a closed world between ourselves and the readers of books and think the world is made up of just that; but there are also the figures I follow constantly. The figures on the numbers and variety of books published in Türkiye, as well as those on reading, also said that we are not in a bad situation at all.

In recent days, together with friends in Ankara, at a conversation with a meal and folk songs (in which the magnificent renditions of Bayram Bilge Tokel, flowing from heart to heart, were performed), organized by our valued friends Necdet Subaşı and Fevzi Mutlu, who, as a continuation of the Quarantine Conversations, created with the İçerdeki Havalar group an important intellectual and emotional setting for conversation, we listened to the figures, comparative with the world's societies, from the General Director of Libraries, Ali Odabaş, on this subject.

The investments made recently in the field of librarianship are of course a distinct mark of the importance and value that the government gives to books. The Millet Library, the fairs, and above all the conversion of the vast expanse of land of the Rami Barracks into a magnificent library, with its historical fabric also preserved, are the most important indicators that a policy friendly to the book, in favor of the book, prevails.

Those who visit the Millet Library in Ankara today can have unforgettable experiences of friendship with books. There are people there who have made reading books their main business, who come and go and bunk down here and there, in a very warm atmosphere that supplies their tea and soup, together with access to every kind of book.

It is pleasing to see that this service, from which book lovers in Ankara have been benefiting for some time, is being repeated in Istanbul too, on a larger scale befitting the fame and size of this world city, on the land of the Rami Barracks. Let this come again and again to those who grumble and lament that there is no investment at all in the field of culture.

We say again and again, because these are of course not the first and only examples of policy in the field of culture and books. The AKM in Taksim, about which it was said "it will be demolished and a shopping mall built on it"; the libraries renewed or rebuilt in all the cities of Türkiye and which, in their content, leave no place for any political-ideological preference or exclusion; the translation into different languages of thousands of books in recent years with the support the Ministry of Culture gives to the translation of Turkish science and literature into other languages, etc. These are the first examples that come to my mind.

The figures given by Ali Odabaş, on the other hand, show that our reading habits place us among the leading countries of the world, beyond what is supposed. For example:

The number of book titles produced by our publishing sector, which was 8,905 in 2000, has risen to 87,231 as of the end of 2021. Despite the increase in paper prices stemming from the cellulose supply problem experienced worldwide, the number of book titles produced in 2022 also came to 83,607. The figures stated here are different book title subjects, that is, variety. It can be seen that in this respect we have a performance that can compete with all the advanced countries of the world. According to the most recent international statistics released by the International Publishers Association and the World Intellectual Property Organization, our country ranks 6th in the world in the number of titles assigned an ISBN and 10th in retail market size.

The total number of books produced by the publishing sector, which was 214,414,289 in 2010, reached 438,679,864 at the end of 2021. In 2022, despite the negative situation mentioned above, this figure came to 380,296,402.

According to the Reading Culture Map Survey conducted by the Ministry of Culture in 2011 to determine reading habits in Türkiye, the number of books per person is 7.2. In the survey renewed in 2018, this figure came out as 9.2. In addition, according to the research conducted by (KONDA) at the end of 2019, whereas in the research conducted in 2008, 70 percent of participants clearly stated that they did not read books, in the latest research conducted in 2019 this ratio has fallen to 36 percent. The proportion of those who state that they read at least one book in the last 3 months appears to have risen from 30 percent to 64 percent.

The research, showing that Türkiye reads on average 2.7 books in 3 months and that this number rises to 4.2 books in the "Readers" cluster, also reveals that the cluster determined as "Able to read" is also not a negligible proportion. The same research also emphasized that young people read more than the middle-aged and elderly groups.

Apart from this, according to the research published by the EU in April 2018, our country ranks 9th among EU countries with an average daily reading time of 7 minutes, and ranks 8th, at 10.2 %, in the rate of describing reading books as one of the main activities on which time is spent.

Europeans spend between 2 and 13 minutes a day reading books. According to research conducted in EU countries, the average daily book reading time is 2 minutes in France, 5 minutes in Italy, Austria and Romania, 13 minutes in Estonia, 12 minutes in Finland, 12 minutes in Poland and 10 minutes in Hungary.

According to this statistic published by the European Statistical Office in 2016, the daily time spent reading books in Türkiye is on average 7 minutes, ranking 9th among EU countries and leaving behind countries such as France, Italy, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium. Is it enough? Of course not, but it is a picture far from being a subject for us to lament over. Let us try to improve it.