Catalan declines as a choice for readers

In 2024, books in Cata­lan re­gained the level of read­ers they had en­joyed be­fore the Covid pan­demic in Cat­alo­nia, at eight out of ten peo­ple. This is the most pos­i­tive con­clu­sion to come out of the lat­est Barom­e­ter of Read­ing and Book Pur­chas­ing Habits in Spain, which also found that last year the num­ber of book read­ers with Cata­lan as their pre­ferred lan­guage fell to 26.8%, as re­ported by the Cata­lan News Agency. There was also a de­cline in those peo­ple whose last book they bought was in Cata­lan, the low­est per­cent­age in the last five years, at 25.6%.

At the state level, for the first time, the per­cent­age of peo­ple in Spain who read books in their free time ex­ceeded 65% of the pop­u­la­tion, some­thing that was al­ready true for Cat­alo­nia, where that num­ber reached 68.9% the pre­vi­ous year.

The an­nual re­port car­ried out by the Fed­er­a­tion of Pub­lish­ers’ Guilds of Spain in­cludes other data on read­ing habits, such as an in­crease in the num­ber of res­i­dents of Cat­alo­nia who have pur­chased non-text­books in the last year, re­gard­less of lan­guage, a per­cent­age (58%) that is ten points higher than in 2019. In this cat­e­gory, Cat­alo­nia tops the rank­ing of au­tonomous com­mu­ni­ties in Spain. Yet in terms of the av­er­age num­ber of books pur­chased per per­son it is one of the low­est, with 7.7 ti­tles per year (Spain’s av­er­age is 8.5).

Read­ing books for leisure has gone up in Spain as a whole (to 65.5% of read­ers), the first time it has ex­ceeded 65%, al­though that num­ber con­tin­ues to be higher in Cat­alo­nia, where it has risen to 68.9%.

As men­tioned above, the one piece of good news for books in Cata­lan is the fact that the num­ber of peo­ple who read in the lan­guage, ha­bit­u­ally or oc­ca­sion­ally, has grown to 80%. In 2020 and 2021, dur­ing the pan­demic and the lock­downs, this num­ber reached a high of 88%, but last year had fallen to 75%.

The an­nual study also looks at the lan­guage of the last books pur­chased and read sep­a­rately, and here there is a dou­ble de­cline for books in Cata­lan. The per­cent­age of peo­ple whose last book they read was in Cata­lan fell to only 25.9% com­pared with 67.9% in Span­ish. Mean­while, re­gard­ing whether the last book they pur­chased was in Cata­lan, the fig­ure is slightly bet­ter, at 28.4%, but the de­cline com­pared to pre­vi­ous years is greater. In 2019, for ex­am­ple, the per­cent­age for the last book bought being in Cata­lan stood at al­most 35%, and in 2022 it was 40.7%.

When asked about the rea­sons for not buy­ing their last book in Cata­lan, the num­ber of those sur­veyed who said that it was be­cause the title was not avail­able in this lan­guage went down from 33.5% in 2023 to 19% last year. Mean­while, the most com­mon re­sponse (30%) given for not buy­ing the last book in Cata­lan was that “read­ing in Span­ish is eas­ier”, while 21% de­clared that they have no pref­er­ence for ei­ther Cata­lan or Span­ish and al­ter­nate be­tween them.

Cata­lan as the pre­ferred lan­guage for read­ing books has suf­fered a set­back com­pared to 2023, and the pre­vi­ous years since 2019. From 36%, it fell to 26.8%. Those who pre­fer to read in Span­ish has grown to 66.6%.

Mean­while, around Spain as a whole, the re­port found that women read more than men in their free time, 71.7% com­pared to 59%.

Re­gard­ing age, most read­ers are young peo­ple aged 14 to 24 (of which 75.3% are leisure read­ers, 1.3% more than in 2023), and ac­cord­ing to level of ed­u­ca­tion, 84.4% of read­ers are in higher ed­u­ca­tion. Even so, there has been a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age in­crease in read­ers with just a basic school ed­u­ca­tion, which has grown to 40%.

fea­ture Cata­lan lan­guage