Reading habits in Europe

Where Germany?

We've read all the books already because we're so efficient.
Germans value privacy to a degree that seems extreme to others. Google maps had a really hard time getting started there, for example. And cash is still widely used because it cannot be traced like card transactions.
- This has nothing to do with privacy. Street polls do very much exist in Germany.
- Just because it may seem extreme to others doesn't mean we're wrong though! And also doesn't mean it should be that much harder to gather data like this.
Below Romania? 😅
No data available.
Germany doesn't exist.
- Well, shit. Where the fuck have I been living all this time?
- *Belgium doesn't exist

The figure published by Eurostat:

A "0 books" category would make this a lot more telling, unless "Less than 5" explicitly means 1-4

i thought its a 100% scale and the missing part on the right represents 0?
but this stat is also missing germany and uk for no reason so its weird to begin with, who knows really
- but this stat is also missing germany and uk for no reason so its weird to begin with, who knows really
  OP should have posted the original source, but there's another comment with the actual Eurostat graph and it's for the EU. It says Germany had no data available and UK is left out because it is not in the EU.
- oh, of course. Should have read the title of the graph :/
The 0 books category is the empty space in the right side of the graph. The graph is about the percentage of people that read at least a book and then the colours say the different amount of books. Like if from 100 people 1 person read 12 books they would still count as only 1%. Their 1% would have a different colour tho. The people reading 0 books don't count towards the percentage of people having read a book.

the color coding for the amount of books is the wrong way around. The classification with the lowest percentage should also come first on the x-axis. Right now you have to mentally subtract to get the percentages for people that read 10 books.

All right then, Germany, keep your secrets.

62% in France only. I don't believe it. They must have only counted novel, excluding comics or something.

@pseudo @meldrik i tought it was lower.
- I guess, I have to stop trusting my anecdotal experience and relie more on data :)

I'm calling BS on those numbers.

Idk where Eurostat gets It's info from but I assume that if you go on the street and ask people about reading books, they'll lie.

70% reading several books, as in from start to finish, not just "read a few pages", in the past 12 months?

Either it's bullshit or the sampling is super biased. I'd believe those numbers of certain parts of the population, but in total? Nah.

I'd like to see how the data would've been affected if the interviewers had also tested that the people know what books they read and roughly what happened in them.

Pretty sure they count audiobooks and comics in
- Oh well then, yeah, I can see that.
  Good point

*Reading habits in the European Union.

Last I checked the UK was still part of Europe!

Can't really be for the EU, either, as it includes Norway and excludes Germany. Not exactly what I'd call beautiful data.
- Weird it has an EU average. That's what threw me.
  Now I'm even more annoyed at this graph.

Romania: Does the Bible count?

Even if it does, do they actually read it?

While with the internet at arm's reach I may not read books as I did before, not even in the past twelve months, I am using that same "mental quality time" to view long videos explaining concepts in relativity and quantum physics, the history of science and of art, ancient cultures and civilizations, the origins of the languages we speak today, how Cuneiform was used in the Bronze Age...

The scope of information - and quality presentation of said information - at our disposal today is mind-boggling, nothing short of astonishing when you start scratching even just YouTube.

I do both. I've recently picked up reading before bed as a healthy habit and I've been slowly working through the Discworld series at about 1 book every month or two. It's nice to not stare at a screen for a bit, although I do generally skip nights where I've stayed up too late staring at screens
Pbs spacetime is absolutely fantastic if you truly want to dive into the physics hole without too much of the math

I always thought these studies would show an inverse relationship to how good the country’s weather is. The colder it is outside, the more likely you’d be to stay inside and learn. But not sure that totally lines up here….

i mean there are quite a few cold ones above and summer destinations below. there might be something there.

IMHO books are the point of view of the writer and is just that, a book. So I prefer get the information from actual people by talking and from all kind of sources.

Am I a joke to you?
fiction

Iceland is missing. I would expect it to score high on that chart.