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.
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.
Even as hyperbole it's too extreme.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
I think it's just people being snooty. Bestsellers are trash, and by definition a plurality of readers are reading them. I don't think someone who reads Gladwell has any greater cognitive power than somebody who reads twitter.
Outside of that, I don't think we should gatekeep it too much though - the biggest benefits come from reading anything at all.
iirc, The Prince from Machiavelli is required reading during secondary education. That will surely awaken their political awareness.
In Spain? Never heard of that, and would not make sense. An italian author writting about politics in Florence?
I never heard of anybody who has read Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Dante or any other "advanced" foreign author in high school.
There are some links with some "obligatory readings" for high school: https://www.edu.xunta.gal/centros/ieslamascastelo/system/fil..., https://www.educa2.madrid.org/web/lengua-castellana-y-litera... http://iesparquegoya.es/files/lengua/Libros%20de%20Lectura%2... or https://iesalgarb.es/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2023/07/1.-... (first links when I search "lecturas recomendadas ESO") where you will find exactly one non-spanish writting author: Ray Bradbury's 451. A spicy teacher, for sure.
Maybe your coworkers read The Prince, but that is not a general recommendation or even something you heard from time to time.
I don't mean that non spanish authors are worse (I dislike many of them because they were forced to me too early, when I preferred Dahl or Tolkien), I am just saying that it makes no sense to recommend Shakespeare instead of Cervantes in Spanish Literature class, where they recommend/require books. I can't imagine Russian Literature teachers requiring "Episodios Nacionales" authored by Galdós, a book about spanish history/politics in the XIX century over any russian author about any russian theme.
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.
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.
93k (Spanish) to 171k English
or
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.
OED (171k) is comparable in content to RAE + RAE Americanisms (93k + 70k = 163k) because OED is pan dialect. RAE core dictionary by itself is not the same type of coverage as OED.
The 1M+ English number is essentially a garbage number from a media tracking company called Global Language Monitor and includes things no serious dictionary would include. 300k+ is for a very comprehensive legit Spanish dictionary with technical and historical words. Those two numbers aren't comparable.
"which you admit is a far lower figure in Spanish vs other languages." no you just misunderstood, the numbers are very comparable.
Looking to your perceptions of ngrams in pop lyrics is not a great way of doing linguistics, there are in fact many alternatives in Spanish for expressing emotions about love, whether you are aware of them or not, or whether song writers over use certain words. English lyrics repeat an awful lot of "love" "heart" and "baby".
- Galician (easy mode, a Romance)
- Basque (they lived nearby the Castillans influenced Latin enough for Spanish, so that's a given)
- Catalan (another Romance)
- maybe Iberian, I'm not sure, through Basque
- Celtic, a common word like perro (dog) it's Celtic
- Gothic -yes, Goths, such as sala (living room), casa, (house) guardia...
- Arabic (most words with al- )
- French (carnét/garage...)
- Italian (most of the artsy stuff from the Enlightenment, such as piano)
and whatnot.
If you just pick up with the huge lyrics set from Spain you will find tons of different poetic registers. Just listen to Triana and Medina Azahara and any folk-rock English composer pales against these, because Triana and Medina Azahara it's the American progressive folk-rock from the 60s/70s mixed with Flamenco, and Flamenco itself it's a remix of music genres from several backgrounds. So the amount of feelings spoken and written in lyrics from that really complex tunes (from Triana more than Mediana Azahara) can't be subpar at all.
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.
Apart from that, the dictionary only list root words, not derivatives.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Get me the kindle sale stats.
From https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...
Readership issues in countries like the USA started way before mass adoption of AI, so also it's not related to AI effects.
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
https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...
https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20260611/ventas-libros-siguen-a...
If you include a screen I've read everyday for the past 25+ years
Screens however, are you including something like an eReader as _not_ reading books?
Very different brain processes. They're the same in that they are both forms of entertainment based on a written story, I guess.
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.
Just that if someone asks you if you were reading this morning, you should probably say "no" if you were listening to a podcast. It's not a value judgement, just a category.
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
Leaving my devices inside and sitting on the porch, reading a book feels much healthier for my brain. And more intentional consumption than passive noise to kill time.
Isn't that how tarot cards and all that bollocks works?
So audiobook genre fiction is reading, but audiobook War and Peace or audiobook The C Programming Language doesn't count. Not for arbitrary gate-keeping reasons, but because reading those books implies a more active form of engagement than marching linearly through it.
Listening to audiobooks, IMHO, is a more passive and less focused way of consuming literature.
A talented reader can work magic. Ukemi and Naxos have great titles.
And reading on screen is reading.
Audio books are passive content. It's not reading. Not remotely the same brain process.
Also, I'm very much convinced that the brain is distracted away from the content by the voice acting and intonation; same way that most people physically can't concentrate when listening to music with vocals, evolution made us really sensitive to the human voice.
All that said, [I find] reading books is overrated. They're often outdated, low effort slop, and even more so in this AI era.
-edit- I said "non-fiction" when I meant "fiction". Of course non-fiction books become obsolete quite fast sometimes.
For those who put in the work, there isn't even a cultural bond to enjoy since most of the people who originally consumed those works are themselves dead and buried. (Modern niches and widely studied "classics" notwithstanding.)
What a crazy take!
> Appreciating it often requires social context I don't really have time to learn.
????
> And many fictional works from the past are chock full of racism, sexism, irrational social phobias, etc
I have some news for you. That stuff has lasted for as long as humans have existed, and will continue to exist as long as humans do. It is intrinsic to humans, unfortunately.
Shakespeare is so old it's now undecipherable to any English speaker without a cliffnotes explaining it all.... for instance
No doubt. Doesn't mean I want to consume more of it via fiction.