22.5% of Indonesians Read at Least One Book Last Year

A book provides access to the universe. But why is book reading in Indonesia so infrequent?

We begin with the data. This is the August 2023 LSI survey. Only 22.5% of the population of Indonesia had read at least one book in the past 12 months.

In contrast, 72.3% of respondents stated, "I had no time to read even one book a year ago."

This is a very low rate of book reading. Just 22 percent of the population! One in five Indonesians are book readers.

Meanwhile, in the developed countries, the average number of individuals who read books is above fifty percent. This means that only one individual out of two does not read books, while the other individual reads books.

Meanwhile, four out of five individuals in Indonesia do not read books. Only one of the five individuals reads books.

What might be the cause? Why is the rate of book reading in Indonesia so low?

How many factors contribute to this? In Indonesia, the oral tradition is so pervasive that the written tradition has not had enough time to fully develop. When schools were introduced by modernity, an increasing number of people learned to read and write. The writing tradition began to develop.

Before the dominant written tradition, the Internet abruptly emerged. Consequently, many individuals no longer pursue information via books. They prefer to seek for information on the internet using a variety of media.

Then came the social media era. Social media has dominated our lives and altered the way we consume information for years. The duration of the majority of social media posts is between one and five minutes. Consequently, we lack the endurance to read lengthy writing. We are only accustomed to perusing brief prose for 1 to 5 minutes.

Reading a book can take hours or even days. The practice of reading swiftly and briefly also contributes to the unpopularity of books.

A book provides access to the universe. Books of literature enrich our minds and broaden our perspectives. The knowledge of the world is contained in non-literary literature.

It's high time we got back to the practice of reading books, especially at a young age.

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A survey was conducted on 1,200 respondents on a national scale with multi-stage random sampling. The margin of error is 2.9%

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Ekspresi Data Denny J.A