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.<p>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.<p>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.
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"<p>(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.)<p>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"<p>(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.
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').<p>Outside of that, I don't think we should gatekeep it too much though - the biggest benefits come from reading anything at all.
> Democracy is safe in Spain!<p>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<p>In Spain? Never heard of that, and would not make sense. An italian author writting about politics in Florence?
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)
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.
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".<p>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!<p>It would be nice if reading researchers could agree on a standard set of survey questions for the purpose of easy comparison.
Spanish is one of the smallest languages in the world at ~93k words.<p>Most languages have hundreds of thousands, English has over a million.<p>Spanish is also nearly phonetic. It's very simple, there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages.<p>Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.
The 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.<p>The rest is not right, the word counts in particular is just a reflection of why counting words in a language is hard:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>"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.
This is the sort of thing you should run through an LLM. I'm surprised people can read that and not have their bs radar go off.<p>The only way to get to a million English words is to start counting things that nobody considers separate, or even real words. Even if you were to use a real dictionary word count (a quick search tells me Merriam-Webster unabridged more than cuts your number in half), I'd wonder if they're counting eg "see" and "seen" as one or two words.<p>(Similarly, 93k comes from RAE, which is intentionally conservative. Just pulling in regional words gets you a few more tens of thousands.<p>Anyway, just a wild thing to read.
You are counting only the words that have been accepted in the RAE dictionary. A word is only accepted when there is a noticeable usage. So there is a lot of words that have not reached the category of “word” officially, but they exist.<p>Apart from that, the dictionary only list root words, not derivatives.
Yes, but I have an outrageous American English accent which ruins my attempt to speak it!
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.<p>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.<p>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.:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830868">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830868</a>
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.<p>If you include a screen I've read everyday for the past 25+ years
Self declared? worthless.<p>Get me the kindle sale stats.
> 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.<p>From <a href="https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-mercado-del-libro-en-el-ano-2025/" rel="nofollow">https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...</a>
The assumption being that all reading must be done on kindle?
>Democracy is safe in Spain!<p>Honestly, this sounds like a shitpost and I'd remove the line if I was the author.<p>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.
> that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict<p>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.<p>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.
>It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts<p>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?
Re: the glorification of reading.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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)
AI effect is delayed in less rich population.
Are you one of those Americans that think that Spain is in Latin-America?
Spain is as rich as Japan on GDP PPP, richer than Israel and New Zealand.<p>Readership issues in countries like the USA started way before mass adoption of AI, so also it's not related to AI effects.
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?
The statistic is total garbage<p>nobody reads books in spain<p>and democracy doesn't have anything to do with that<p>and democracy is not desirable per se<p>but of course it wouldn't need to be stated if the writer wasn't a dogmatic idy0t