No Spanish reading crisis?

https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/no-spanish-reading-crisis

by jruohonen • 9 days ago

91 137 9 days ago

commonreader.co.uk

jruohonen• 9 days ago

Ref.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830868

jimmydoe• 9 days ago

AI effect is delayed in less rich population.

Anduia• 9 days ago

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?

piva00• 8 days ago

Spain 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• 8 days ago

Saying Spain is rich while half the population lives on 1,000 euros per month (mil euristas) is crazy or just very "technically accurate".

elnatro7• 8 days ago

Are you one of those Americans that think that Spain is in Latin-America?

outime• 9 days 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.

christkv3• 9 days ago

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)

yorwba2• 8 days ago

The source is https://www.cultura.gob.es/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baromet...

some_random• 8 days ago

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.

actionfromafar• 8 days ago

Reading a book is also a decent proxy for being able to hold your attention for more than 5 seconds.

the_af• 8 days ago

Re: the glorification of reading.

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.

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.

n4r9• 8 days ago

that doesn't make you or "democracy" better than a non-reader that may be a movie watcher addict

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.

paulryanrogers5• 8 days ago

It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts and doesn't succumb to constant tech distractions.

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.

derektank• 8 days ago

It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts

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?

Chu4eeno• 7 days ago

Apparently not enough focus to sit down and check if the studies were comparable (time and cohort)...

bcjdjsndon3• 9 days ago

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.

If you include a screen I've read everyday for the past 25+ years

world2vec4• 8 days ago

IMHO screens and audio don't count as reading books.

KaiserPro2• 8 days ago

Could 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

paulryanrogers5• 8 days ago

The article doesn't distinguish reading books from reading anything else. Though it's pretty short and light on details. The article it cites strongly implies the reading is only books.

All that said, [I find] reading books is overrated. They're often outdated, low effort slop, and even more so in this AI era.

nicbou• 8 days ago

I disagree.

I read books, but I also read essays, newsletters, blogs, Wikipedia articles, discussions and so on. These also contain important and useful information. It's not a dichotomy between books and slop. Hell, a lot of books should have been blog posts.

Audiobooks are also valid, as are podcasts. Sure, they might not engage you like text does, but they still impart knowledge.

To me, this is like ranting against electric bikes because they're not as difficult. If they get more people to engage in a fun activity, then they serve their purpose.

rupertdev• 8 days ago

I personally think that though the medium is different, audiobooks are at least _similar_ to reading a book.

Screens however, are you including something like an eReader as _not_ reading books?

pier25• 8 days ago

Screens don't count?

erelong• 8 days ago

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"

(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• 8 days ago

I've seen many of these types of articles, and usually they are taking about long form reading, meaning books.

brainwad3• 8 days ago

What'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?

another-dave• 8 days ago

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').

Outside of that, I don't think we should gatekeep it too much though - the biggest benefits come from reading anything at all.

ghusto2• 8 days ago

The study focuses on books (and comics, but that only bumped it up by a couple of percent).

toolslive3• 8 days 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• 8 days ago

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.

otherme1235• 8 days 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?

Muromec4• 8 days ago

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.

toolslive3• 8 days ago

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)

pezezin3• 8 days ago

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. I am Spanish and I don't know of anybody who was required to read Machiavelli in high school.

Telemakhos• 8 days ago

It was required when I was a student in American schools. I don't think it really had much to do with democracy, though. I suppose there are lessons that you could generalize to any state, like "don't hire mercenaries," but I wouldn't say that it gave lessons especially relevant to either Athenian style democracy or to the mixed constitutions called "democracies" from the late eighteenth century to the present.

brador• 8 days ago

Self declared? worthless.

Get me the kindle sale stats.

watwut2• 8 days ago

The assumption being that all reading must be done on kindle?

lbrito2• 8 days ago

From the same creators of "no one writes code by hand anymore".

elnatro7• 8 days 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-...

schnitzelstoat• 8 days ago

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.

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.

ghusto2• 8 days 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-kebab2• 8 days ago

You 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• 8 days 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• 8 days ago

Yeah sadly let’s not kid ourselves, most people on their phone on the subway (in the USA) are watching very low quality short form video content. Or they’re reading gossip subreddits or something. If you want to really scare yourself go check out what teachers have to say about the current crop of students and their literacy rates.

We should 100% ban all smart devices for people under 18. Not just in schools but entirely. Middle schoolers literally can’t spell their own names, or words like “want” and “cat”. I would have assumed some of the teachers were pearl-clutching but it’s not just a few of them saying this, it’s all of them, including my own mom who I trust a lot.

lbrito2• 8 days ago

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.

That's a weird take. The internet has basically no barriers. Book publishing, with all of its many flaws, does. Anyone can technically self publish a book, but the odds that you'll find someone on the subway reading it are small. So odds are the book you see people reading on transit is on average better than an internet content.

pessimizer5• 8 days ago

No, the vast majority of published books are (and have always been) an insult to trees.

FranOntanaya• 8 days ago

Most places where people do their weekly groceries in Spain have at least a small book section if not a bookstore by the entrance. It's a typical thing to bring over to the beach or a weekend trip that doesn't matter if it gets damaged or lost.

Myself I have an e-ink reader but almost always take a paper book on the subway. It's still better quality print, not fragile in any way that matters, and I don't have to think about charge or aging electronics. I only bring the e-reader for manuals and such that change too often to be worth the paper cost, but still miss the old coding manuals with their ad-hoc page sizes, the spatial sense of where the information was in a book was part of the memory anchoring.

christkv3• 8 days ago

I´ve ended up switching back to paper for half of my reading. Kids prefer paper for reading to. Kindle goes with me on vacation when I don´t want to drag around 2-3 kilos of paper (Reading chunky history books at the moment).

bojan3• 8 days ago

I wonder if this is the reason Spain resisted the advent of far right for so long, compared to its European counterparts.

pessimizer5• 8 days ago

The Spanish Civil War would like to have a word with you, but maybe Franco is part of "the resistance" now.

sebastiennight4• 8 days ago

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.

You've received several answers on the "quality" side due to books being harder to create, but I'll cover two more arguments:

1. Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore, especially not on their phones. They're mindlessly scrolling short-form video, either muted or blasting them really loud with no headphones, if my experience of Spanish subway is accurate.

2. Even if all books were just printed directly from random internet pages, and there was zero difference in quality, it would be a huge step-up to go from reading one internet page at a time, to focusing on the same content for 200+ pages in a row. There is huge value in giving ourselves the longer attention span.

broken-kebab2• 8 days ago

Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore

Even as hyperbole it's too extreme.

timthelion• 8 days ago

I guess I'm nobody then. I almost only read the internet.

solid_fuel• 8 days ago

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.

I don't think it's really about the quality, I think the difference is that with a book there's no easy next tab to switch to when a sentence or passage gets too long and loses your interest. Even if a book is poorly written, it will still require you to either fully focus for the duration - or put it down. There's no convenient "leave the tab open in the background and switch to something else for 30 seconds" for books like there is with the internet.

d0gmatism• 8 days ago

The 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

elnatro7• 8 days ago

What 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-...

https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20260611/ventas-libros-siguen-a...

codeadict• 8 days ago

As 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

yorwba2• 8 days ago

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".

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.

pessimizer5• 8 days ago

My 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• 8 days ago

Like DAU vs MAU

cherrylemonsoda• 8 days ago

Spanish 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• 8 days ago

Yes, but I have an outrageous American English accent which ruins my attempt to speak it!

ctoa3• 8 days ago

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.

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• 8 days ago

Using your figures:

93k (Spanish) to 171k English

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.

guille_• 8 days ago

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.

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.

(Similarly, 93k comes from RAE, which is intentionally conservative. Just pulling in regional words gets you a few more tens of thousands.

Anyway, just a wild thing to read.

elnatro7• 8 days ago

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.

Apart from that, the dictionary only list root words, not derivatives.

pessimizer5• 8 days ago

Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.

I'm with you on almost everything else, but the fact that it is such an unwieldy, awkward language means that a ton of communication is by idiom (that just has to be memorized, that's where a lot of the "vocabulary" is), and an enormous amount is allowed to be assumed and left unsaid (aggressively "pro-drop.") Also, the fact that sentence word order is just conventional in Spanish as opposed to strict like Germanic languages or French means that you can do whatever you want with it with the same literal meaning but giving a different connotative impression. Spanish is a great language for poetry but a bad language for communication. Extremely expressive, but not as expressive through the means of vocabulary choices.

The fact that in English you can't just move the words around for emphasis or association means that we need more words, but the fact that our words aren't mutating a fraction as much in order to indicate their function, instead using position, means that any sound put into a particular position will serve that position's function. You can just quack like a duck for the verb, and let people figure out what that noise means the subject is doing. If ducks used the Roman alphabet, English would also just accept the duck spelling without changing it, and use the fact that you don't know how duck words are pronounced as a class marker.

But I think (native English-speaking) people vastly underestimate how difficult English is to read and write. Spanish is easy to read, and almost as easy to write. If you spell a word wrong in Spanish, it probably means that you're also saying it wrong. If Spanish is a 2 in reading difficulty and Chinese characters are an 8, English is probably a 6.

I think the people here denying that Spanish is a small language and that English is an absurdly large language are being guided by the "Law of Averages." Languages being smaller or larger isn't an indication of virtue or grace. It makes literacy a nightmare and is used to discriminate by class and region. English has an excessive number of words that duplicate each other, and as a result (and as a German) so many (and a variable number of by region) vowels that a phonetic written English is a pipedream.

English and Spanish have different grammatical and sound characteristics that allow English to take on new vocabulary casually, and allow Spanish to have a vocabulary largely circumscribed by the RAE (w the Mexican supplements [edit: and the unwritten Chilean one.]) Those characteristics also mean that you could teach an adult Spanish illiterate to read well in a month, and for an adult English illiterate it will take years. English (and French, and Portuguese, and Chinese, and Japanese, etc.) are horrible languages for reading and writing.

If say English number bigger than Spanish number, no need get mad.

mpeg• 8 days ago

Spanish is certainly an easy language to learn, but it’s a very hard language to master.

I’m a native Spanish speaker and I find English poetry much easier to understand, English is more rigid and while technically it might have a larger vocabulary you can do less with it, while the flexibility of Spanish in terms of word order and suffixes makes it possible to craft some really labyrinthine verses

clint• 8 days ago

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.

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• 8 days ago

Inter-country statistics almost entirely rely on definitional disparity. Border towns are good sources of comparison.

tedggh• 8 days ago

How much of the decline in the US could be attributed to Fountas & Pinnell?

Glandalf2• 8 days ago

The 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.

Daishiman• 8 days ago

Take this incel garbage back to 4chan.

Glandalf2• 8 days ago

Ruin 4chan and the whole internet becomes 4chan, you know this to be true.

dzonga• 8 days ago

Anglophone 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.

No Spanish reading crisis?

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