By Park Si-soo
Nearly 40 percent of South Korean adults don't read a book a year, a stunning
that the time-tested way to gain knowledge, wisdom and insight is losing luster amid the text-to-video shift of preferred sources of information powered by high-speed internet.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism found this in a survey of 9,000 people ― 6,000 adults and 3,000 school-age children.
The average number of books an adult reads a year is six, down from eight found in the previous survey two years ago.
The ministry said “book” referred to in the survey was a comprehensive concept of paper book, e-book and audio book combined. And given that a single-digit rate of adults responded they used only e-books or audio books, the average number of conventional paper books they read would be even lower, it said.
The rate of school-age children was the opposite ― 90.7 percent of them read at least a book a year and the average number of books they read is 32.4. While the ratio was 1 percent down from the previous survey, the average went up 3.8 books.
Both groups showed a sharp increase in time spent consuming non-text content. Nearly 29 percent of adults said they found it difficult to have time for book-reading because of “non-text content” that they got immersed in, while 21 percent of children said smartphones, internet searches and games deprived them of time to read books.