It is disappointing: adults barely read at home, and children do not understand what they read

Writing begins with reading, they say, and depending on this, we get a rather depressing picture if we look at the analysis of UNESCO and the Office of the National Assembly.

The Office of the Parliament gave a report on the tragic situation in the area of ​​writing and reading skills: according to their report, around 800 million people in the world are illiterate. It means that

10 percent of the planet’s population (there are approximately 8 billion of us on Earth) are illiterate.

It is quite certain that the fact that UNESCO plays a major role in this according to the closure of schools and universities affects 1.5 billion students and young people in the world. Of these 1.5 billion, 250 million children cannot learn to read and write at all. South Asia is home to almost half of the illiterate population, while 27 percent live in sub-Saharan Africa.

UNESCO always emphasizes that literacy

• encourages sustainable development,
• enables greater participation in the labor market,
• improves the health and nutrition of children and families,
• reduces poverty and expands life opportunities.

In line with this idea, the Global Alliance for Literacy within the Framework of Lifelong Learning was established in 2016.

Trouble starts in elementary school

If we examine the phenomenon in a domestic context, we see that 20-25 percent of the Hungarian adult population is functionally illiterate. In addition, the survey of the Office of Education (OH). according to 40 percent of the approximately 90,000 graduating students tested in primary schools, or approximately 36,000 children nationally, cannot even interpret a text at a basic level. It means that

they can read the text written in their native language, but they do not understand the context of the sentences, the essence of the information they carry.

From text comprehension in all three examined grades a girls they achieved a better average result. Moving towards the higher grades, the girls’ advantage increases, in the 6th grade they achieved a better average result than the boys with 32 points, in the 8th grade 38 points, and in the 10th grade 48 points.

According to the report of the Parliamentary Office, it is typical that 70 percent of ten-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot understand a simple written text.

The numbers don’t lie on the book market either

In light of the above data, it is not at all surprising that, according to research conducted since 1981, the proportion of regular and occasional readers was the lowest in 2023, and the proportion of non-readers was the highest.

56 percent of the adult Hungarian population does not read at all – never, ever. It’s even scarier if we count the percentages:

56 out of 100 people do not pick up a book at all in Hungary.

29 percent of society only reads occasionally, and only 15 percent – that is, 15 out of 100 people – declare that they read books regularly.

The reasons are also listed in the collection of the OGY office, and accordingly

• 45 percent don’t read because they don’t like it,
• 33 percent do not have time for it,
• 21 percent prefer to watch movies,
• 13 percent only want to read a short
• 6 percent do not have money for it,
• 2 percent cited other reasons.

According to the report, women (18 percent), young adults (19 percent), graduates (44 percent), Budapest residents (22 percent) and people living in county seats (18 percent) read regularly. It is shocking that the data shows that men (63 percent), people with low education (76 percent), people living in cities smaller than the county seat (62 percent), people from the southern Great Plains (65 percent) and people from the south almost never read books. – people from Transdanubia (61 percent).

E-book 11 percent of the population read with some frequency, 7 percent read or listen to audio books, and among the adult population, fiction and entertainment literature are the most popular genres.

The popularity and use of e-book technology, by the way, lags far behind that of printed books, so it has not lived up to expectations for the time being. The main reason for this is readers’ aversion to new technology, as well as the relatively high price of e-readers and e-books.

In Hungary, e-publications are considered a service provided electronically, so they are subject to a general sales tax of 27 percent, while printed books are subject to 5 percent. Previously, Economx wrote about the fact that the professional organization of book publishers has been asking for years to reduce the VAT rate for e-books to 5 percent. The e-book market in Hungary is 2 percent of the total book market, but at the same time there are many illegal downloads

We are well below the EU average when it comes to book purchases

The economic effects of the covid pandemic affected book publishing and book buyers in several ways. The 2020-2022 quarantine measures brought a boom in shopping and reading worldwide, and were particularly favorable to online sales.

In 2022, the number of copies sold on the Hungarian book market increased to nearly 44 million, the book turnover was HUF 59.4 billion.

In recent years, the industry has faced serious problems, from 2021 the prices of printing raw materials will rise significantly, and the price of paper will increase by 60-150 percent due to the international cellulose bans. Added to this are the negative processes affecting the economy (inflation, rising energy prices), so it is difficult to plan the pricing of books, sometimes the price of the book has to be changed during production.

According to the trend, although the willingness to read and the number of book buyers are decreasing, those who remain in the market are reading more and more books and spending more on publications.

It cannot be ignored that the book market supports a lot of people: it is an interesting fact, for example, that the work of at least 45 people is required for the birth of a book – from the author to the printing press. In the European Union, the book value chain employs more than half a million people, and the sales revenue of book publishers amounted to nearly 24 billion euros.

EU households spent 25 percent of their cultural expenses on books and newspapers, and the share of citizens’ total income spent on books and newspapers was the highest in Slovakia in 2022 (1.8 percent), while the EU average was 1.1 percent. In this category, Hungary is well below the average, at only 0.7 percent.