At Biblioteka Narodowa: A view of the Polish National Library reading room after its renovation. Image: CC BY SA 4.0
By Jarosław Adamowksi | @JaroslawAdamows
Poland’s Annual Library Survey: 9 Percent Rise in Reading
IIn a positive development for Poland’s publishing industry, an estimated 43 percent of Poles who were surveyed said they’d read at least one book in 2023, up 9 percent compared with responses reported in 2022. Collected by the country’s state-run Polish National Library for its annual report, this data indicates that Poland in 2023 fielded its strongest book-reading level among respondents in some 10 years.
“In 2023,” text from the National Library report reads, “43 percent of respondents said that they had read at least one book in the 12 months preceding the survey.
“This is significantly more than in previous years—apart from 2020, this indicator remained at a lower level for almost the entire decade. This increase is particularly visible if we take into account the results of measurements conducted by the National Library in 2021 and 2022.”
Last year, per the results of the newly released study, the most popular genres among Polish readers remained crime and thriller novels, with 28 percent of the country’s readers stating their preference for those books, as well as romance and erotic literature, with at a rate of 22 percent.
Biographies and nonfiction historical literature followed, at 17 percent. Self-help literature, with 16 percent, was close behind according to the figures released by the National Library.
In terms of format, print continued to dominate in the Polish market, with 98 percent of local respondents told surveyors that they read print books last year, and 7 percent said that they read either all in print or with some mix of other formats.
“Book shopping continues to be popular among [Polish book] readers regardless of their gender,” the report’s authors write. “People aged 25 to 39 buy books slightly more often [than the average reader], while those from older generations and teenagers buy them less often. The largest number of book buyers can be found among men who read books and live in cities with populations of more than 500,000 inhabitants: as much as 65 percent [of the total],” the report said.
“People who like to read a lot are particularly keen on buying books, as 57 percent of such people bought a book and read it” in 2023, according to survey results.
Data collected by the National Library shows that, in 2019, some 40 percent of respondents said that they bought the books they read that year (rather than borrowing them). In 2022, this was down to 36 percent. However, since then, Poland’s book sales have picked up, and in 2023, 48 percent of respondents said the titles they read that year were purchased.
This was accompanied by a decrease in the number of respondents who identified public libraries as the main source of the books they read, down from 18 percent in 2019 to 14 percent last year, as indicated by data from the National Library.
In Digital Formats
A view of a Polish National Library public space after its renovation. Image: CC BY SA 4.0
Mikołaj Małaczyński, the co-founding CEO of the Poznań-based ebook and audiobook subscription service Legimi, tells Publishing Perspectives that Poland’s publishing industry hopes the government will decide to introduce a zero-percent value-added tax rate (VAT) rate on books, ebooks, and news-media sales.
“The industry is definitely looking forward to a zero-percent VAT,” Małaczyński says. “This kind of stimulus could contribute to a major improvement in the entire sector’s profitability after the industry for the past few years has faced high inflation, increased workforce costs, and a drop in consumers’ purchasing power.”
The country’s VAT rates are currently set at 5 percent for books, ebooks, and for the products of local and regional press outlets. An 8-percent rate is applied to national newspapers and magazines.
Małaczyński says that supporting public libraries and equipping them with the necessary software and content supply solutions is high on industry priorities.
“We see the role of libraries,” he says, “as being important to building a modern and well-informed civil society. At the same time, we cooperate with content creators and providers as well as publishers in developing the most productive business models, in hopes of a win-win situation. The effects of these activities allow Legimi to continue to increase its user base.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Polish book and publishing market is here, more on libraries is here, more on reading development is here, and more on industry statistics is here.
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